This is what the systemic racism narrative is, no? I cannot provide you with specific references — synthesis

Here's a reference: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein.

The 'color of law" doesn't refer to race. It means "under the cover of law", like the law under which the FHA operated for many years.

The Color of Law is a study of one large piece of racism which was systemic: the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) started in 1935 helped finance new suburban housing for white people and urban high-rise rental housing for blacks. Racially mixed neighborhoods were denied financial backing, which encouraged their slide into slums--mostly occupied by black people.

If you read much about urban history (Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, etc.) you will find other examples of systemic racism -- that is, racial discrimination that operated consistently and over time.

Urban history doesn't account for all racial disadvantage. Plenty of racial bias was and is unsystematic, individualized, inconsistent, and persistent.

If you look just how long horse drawn wagons and the early cars roamed the streets together, that did take a while. — ssu

"German soldier and his horse in the Russian SFSR, 1941. In two months, December 1941 and January 1942, the German Army on the Eastern Front lost 179,000 horses.[1]

relative to Lord Elgin, who spent his entire family fortune to save the marbles of the Acropolis, which at the time was being used as an ammo dump in a war between the Greeks and the Turks. — counterpunch

26 September 1687: After the Ottoman conquest, it [the Parthenon] was turned into a mosque in the early 1460s. On 26 September 1687, an Ottoman ammunition dump inside the building was ignited by Venetian bombardment during a siege of the Acropolis. The resulting explosion severely damaged the Parthenon and its sculptures.

From 1801 to 1812, agents of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin removed about half of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon, as well as sculptures from the Propylaea and Erechtheum.

Hey, Counterpunch: I've seen the Elgin Marbles at the BM, and I'm kind of glad he took them. Ditto for the Rosetta Stone. It would have been better had his predecessors acquired the sculptures before the idiot Turks decided to store explosives in one of the most beautiful buildings the world has seen, but... 20/20 rearview vision.

Huge infrastructure costs and loss of revenues at the same time, will cause economic havoc, political instability - war, famine and death. — counterpunch

In a discussion among some leftists about a year ago, that very point about global warming was made: the consequences of an abrupt halt to the auto/fossil fuel segment of the economy (a large hunk) would be a catastrophic blow to the global economy. Not abruptly halting the the auto/fossil fuel segment of the economy (along with other fossil fuel use) guarantees an environmental catastrophe.

in other words, we are screwed.

Totally screwed, because we don't have time to implement reliance on magma, wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, et al. As a rule of thumb, 40 to 50 years are required to implement major technological changes--from proof of concept to commonplace. 30 more years of roll-out for solar and wind puts us at 2051. 50 years for geo-thermal puts us at 2071. Too late in either case to forestall major disaster.

We can, we should, we must press forward on all fronts, from magma to heavy reliance on bicycles, bearing in mind that we can't avoid major environmental losses.

With respect to housing policy, there is ample evidence that racial discrimination was baked into the enabling legislation and implementation. The government policies didn't invent racial discrimination -- they hardened it into the national landscape.

One doesn't need to do very much reading on the HRA to realise that your explanation of the issues, conflates effect with cause. — counterpunch

Actually, one has to do quite a lot of reading to see that I am NOT conflating effect with cause.

Certainly, there were (and are) other major factors which contribute to the wealth/poverty distribution we see today in the US. One doesn't have to be a leftist to acknowledge that. When one compares the collective performance of Immigrant groups, like Somalis, to American blacks, it is clear that big cultural differences are at work. Same for some other immigrant groups who have succeeded under difficult circumstances.

As for boring into the earth to tap the energy derived from the hot interior, pause to consider the technical and maintenance issues involved in a) reaching geologically stable, very hot layers of the crust, and b) putting pipes into very hot, highly corrosive environments for many years. Geothermal is a good thing where feasible, but it's not a maintenance free source.

The entire point of worrying about energy extraction from fossil fuel and 1.4 billion cars (plus more commercial vehicles), and wasteful energy use is global warming -- a crisis which is unfolding before us. We'll need to use solar, wind, geo-thermal, hydro, and anything else we can devise on the production end to avoid economic, cultural, and environmental collapse. 1.4 billion cars--and their continued production and replacement--is simply not sustainable -- meaning, it's not compatible with reducing CO2 levels.

Forcing everybody into common poverty? NOBODY wants to do that. We just don't have another 100 years to make a graceful transition from fossil to hydrogen fuel. We probably don't have 50 years.

It isn't an ideological commitment that makes me doubt that humankind will ever achieve post-materiality -- a la Star Trek and other very optimistic science fiction themes. It would be splendid if we could do that -- but post-materiality rests on ideas that have no material reality at the present time. Mine asteroids for metal, gases, water, etc.? That would be great. Put heavy industry on the moon? Fine. We recently returned a tiny packet of dust from an asteroid, and it took years for the vessel to reach the rock and return--and this is a once-off success.

It seems like 'post materiality' requires that we figure out how to get something from nothing.

we'd need over 6000 windmills, at a cost of £1500bn. They have a working life of 25 years, and after that - same again. — counterpunch

I doubt if the entire windmill has to be replaced every 25 years; it's probably the generator at the top, driven by the blades, that has to be replaced. Well, nuclear plants don't last indefinitely; neither do coal fired generators, or hydro-electric.

Clearly we can not merely power the present wasteful energy-use regime with solar or wind power. We have to cease and desist. There are presently over 1 billion cars in the world, almost all of them powered by fossil fuel. The solution is not to build many millions of windmills to power billions of cars; the solution is to get rid of cars, and replace them with other methods of transportation.

That was adopted in 1870. Read in relation to the rest of the Constitution, that guarantees legal equality, it's quite difficult to understand how "economic racism" has been effected. Poverty is not proof of racism. But it is very difficult to escape. — counterpunch

It was easy because the constitution and laws were just ignored, not just by private parties, but by the US Government and the States. Prime Example: in the mid-1930s, a large program was created to improve the nation's deteriorating housing stock. The plan was to help finance new housing--hell, new city-suburbs. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) helped millions of people obtain mortgages for good quality new housing in new communities. Thanks to pressure from southern senators, the program explicitly barred blacks, Jews, and other minorities from the mortgage program. (Unconstitutional? Of course it was.)

For urban blacks, the FHA built new rental housing--large high-rise complexes. The rules went so far as to say that a mortgage for housing in urban cores could not be granted to a white family if there was so few as one black family on the block, and blacks were altogether ineligible for urban-core loans.

The financial value of the millions of new properties located in thriving suburbs, coast to coast, appreciated handsomely. This allowed millions of white home owners to accumulate significant equity, which could be used to further the families upward mobility. It was an all-around good deal. for whites.

Eventually the courts and congress eliminated racial barriers in FHA programs. It was, however, too late to undo the long term damage. The millions of homes in white suburbs were now too expensive for any but well-off blacks to buy. Plus, the all-white suburbs mostly wanted to--and have--stayed white.

So, the FHA program doesn't account for black poverty entirely. Employment discrimination has to be factored in, as do poor education programs, poor community health care, and so on and so forth.

I'm in the UK, and I'm Blairite still. It was after the fall of Communism in Russia and China, Blair sought a Third Way - re-rooting socialist values in a compromise with capitalist economics. It was very popular. — counterpunch

The US (and I assume the UK and EU countries) have at times reined in the excesses of capitalism through tax law. Higher taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations reduces disparities, and funds the government at a high enough level to effectively serve the common good. Low taxes puts us where we are now -- a starved public service sector and a bloated wealthy class -- the 1%, or 1/10 of 1%ers.

The closer you look, the worse it gets.

One of my problems (being a lefty) is I don't like a lot of the Left's knee-jerk positions. Like... the so-called cancel culture where one rumor of disapproved behavior and you are out of the game. Like... the left's insistence on the rights of any person to immigrate from anywhere to anywhere else. Like... the hasty adoption of leftist buzz words (like white privilege) by people who were not interested in their privileged status (if they even were) until it became a sign of virtue to confess it. Ad nauseam.

Intelligence may be a factor in police encounters. It seems self-evident to me that aggression toward cops is always a bad idea. local culture with respect to machismo is another; even style figures into what happens when police and civilians have freighted encounters. If "in-your-face" confrontation is de rigueur in interpersonal behavior, that could result in a hostile response from the police. Having a string of criminal convictions is a prejudicial fact. Et cetera.

Clearly, black people have been the targets of highly discriminatory practices since the days of slavery. There are planned, managed, systematically executed reasons why black people in the United States are, on average, poor. Their poverty is neither self-inflicted nor accidental. Economic racism has been at work. But economic exploitation is an equal opportunity game. The white working class has, by and large, been fucked over since the earliest colonial period of US history. So have a lot of other people.

As for the history of slavery, everybody was fair game. Back in the day when Britain was considered barbarian, slaves from Britain were quite popular--red hair, pink complexions, exotic. Thank the Romans for that. In Classical Greece, anyone could become a slave through financial misfortune. And once enslaved, many stayed enslaved.

Given that half of government and all of the media are steeped in political correctness; given that Kier Starmer leapt to his knees for Black Lies Matter, and unequivocally endorsed gender self identification - and that the London Mayor just spent £1.3m of public money promoting Black Lies Matter on New Year's Eve, given that Parler has been banned by Google in an ongoing politically correct crusade against freedom of speech, I'd say, they're getting there. Which takes me back to where I came in - with StreetlightX, saying he would murder racists. So how is any of this funny? — counterpunch

Now, don't get me confused with StreetlightX.

was "...public money promoting Black Lies Matter..." deliberate or accidental? I'm not a big BLM fan; granted, the police resort to deadly force in many cases where disabling force would be much more appropriate. Still, black deaths at the hands of police are a small fraction of the deaths caused by civilian (usually black on black) gunfire. BLM should focus on black-on-black gun deaths as well as death by police.

My guess is that most people killed by the police are poor, whether they are black, hispanic, white or asian. A lot of police effort is directed at controlling "the rabble" at the bottom, -- the poor. That so many blacks are poor is a better cause-effect relationship with respect to racism than the activities of the police.

My guess is the Google and Apple did not ban Parler apps for reasons of political correctness. Neither corporation wants to appear as minor league tools of major league politics. Google and Apple are both very much part of The Establishment. Further, the rich people who own Google and Apple (stock holders) are generally always on the side of Law & Order, except when it comes to tax law. As a group, the rich have little (or none) sympathy with the relative poor and trouble makers.

The political right (conservatives, Republicans, etc.) have not been suffering from a lack of access to free speech. Neither has the opposite side of the aisle. If some socialists started calling for a violent take over of (Rhode Island or maybe North Dakota--never mind the U.S Congress) you can rest, assured that they will be promptly deplatformed.

We do not have absolute free speech. Some topics have been ruled out of bounds. I don't like it, but that's life.

This is a philosophy forum, and left wing politically correct dogma seeks to control Western civilisation.
— counterpunch

The shame of this is that you'll never understand why that's hilarious. — Kenosha Kid

Doctrinaire, "politically correct" ideologues would perhaps like to control Western Civilization, but really, how likely are they to succeed? A lot of people want to enforce their favorite etiquette manual, but barbarians keep ripping them up.

But that hardly matters as it's basically a religion and ideology than a scientific theory.

And anyway, I'm not so sure how much modern day leftism has to do with Marx anymore. — ssu

I recently blew up what I thought was a solid friendship by confessing that I no longer had an interest in reading or discussing Marx, especially in the context of what seems like the rapidly impending environmental disaster. By the time socialists achieve mass working class consciousness, Wall Street and the working class will have both drowned--literally or figuratively.

"Far left", "left" and "leftist" are still appealing labels, but when push comes to shove, what exactly do they mean? The "far right" and "right" seem like clearer labels. Editorial content in the Wall Street Journal (part of the Dow Jones company) seems consistently pro-capitalist, pro-corporate, pro-property, pro-reduced regulation, and so forth.

Solidly "left", even fairly "far left" publications and web sites are usually not in favor of abolishing private property and the corporation-protecting state. For that one has to turn to specifically revolutionary sites (most of which have been "preserved in aspic").

"Left" and "right" are maybe more terms of cultural and/or psychological difference, but even then they are 'leaky'. Leftists seem more tolerant of social deviation (until they are not). Right wingers seem resistant to social deviation, until they are not. (Example: the crowd that captured the capital last Wednesday looked a lot more like the anti-law-and-order hippies of old than I would have expected: blue jeans, beards, bare chested-tattooed, etc. Or maybe my cultural categories are out of date.).

Our old, handy, and familiar categories just don't work very well any more.

I am not sure denying evil Trump supporters from expressing their views is in line with allowing free speech. — FreeEmotion

Free speech is free speech, no restrictions apart from reckless endangerment (like yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater that isn't on fire). So yes, crazy Trump supporters can repeat the QAnon story about Satan-worshipping child molesters running the country. And you can call Trump supporters evil and/or insane.

Twitter doesn't have to allow QAnon posters, or vegans for that matter. They are under some obligation to play fairly, however. They can't ban blacks from Twitter, for instance.

To paraphrase an old saying: we have nothing to gain but more chains. I think it is time to bow down to people in power and accept our lot with meekness and thanksgiving. — FreeEmotion

As in "Eat shit and die"? Clearly you are not feeling well. Take two aspirins and call me in the morning.

“Other than Netflix, Andrew Cuomo and the virus itself, no one has benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic more than American billionaires. — FreeEmotion

It's not clear to me how billionaires have benefitted from Covid-19. When you have that much money, it is quite difficult to not come out ahead regardless of what is happening,

How would he know if ballots were scanned multiple times? How would you know? — FreeEmotion

Democratic and Republican poll watchers were observing voting and ballot counting, both with vested interests in the outcome. Fraud (such as multiple re-scanning) would have been visible to the observers.

There are also statistical checks: the number of potential voters in a precinct is a known quantity. The historical average of votes is known. Voting patterns in precincts, districts, and states can and do change, but extreme changes are not common. When there is an actual landslide (such as in 1972 when McGovern (D-South Dakota) lost to Nixon by a landslide) the landslide occurs everywhere, pretty much.

There was nothing strange about the 2020 election results. There was a small shift toward the Biden/Harris ticket. That's all that it took.

Trump kept repeating that the election would be fraudulent, way before November. He was laying the groundwork for the post-election fraud claim, in the event he lost. Too bad for Trump, multiple re-counts kept coming up short. This seems to have been intolerable to him.

Shouldn't it be the government that decides what to censor or is it up to private organizations? — FreeEmotion

The US Constitution restricts The State (or the states) from interfering with free speech. Private organizations (like churches, corporations, universities) are not so limited. That's why speech codes are more common on private campuses than public ones, or why Congress can not make Donald Trump shut the fuck up.

There is no such thing as free speech at work. If the boss wants to forbid his employees from discussing unions at work, he can.

Mass delusions of the political kind are quite common. We socialists in American engage in delusional thinking just about every day. In this we share delusional thinking with people who think that through hard work and inspiration they will become rich, maybe as rich as Elon Musk or Bill Gates. Or that they have a good chance of winning the lottery. There is the delusion that Democrats will deliver heaven and the Republicans will deliver hell (or visa versa). There's the delusion, shared by millions, that vaccinations are part of a conspiracy of Satanic proportions (a la QAnon), ad nauseam.

Trump is perhaps delusional, or perhaps he is fiendishly clever. I tend to think it's the former because fiendish cleverness requires a lot of cognitive horse power, which we have not seen much evidence of in Trump. He isn't stupid (presumably) but he's no stable genius either.

Part of Donald Trumps very large problem is that he spurned proper etiquette. Other presidents may have been delusional, but they minded their 'Ps and Qs'. (Nixon was a crook, but his corrupt practices were outsourced and performed at night, the way skullduggery is supposed to be done.) They played their part properly. Trump did not -- and it would appear that he had not paid enough attention to know what "proper" was for an elected high public official. Manipulating the masses is, of course, de rigueur, and he knew how to do that but it's supposed to be subtle -- not a travesty.

His biggest delusion was his sense of entitlement to the presidency. I suppose he thought of it as a lifetime job. A lot of problems have been caused by people thinking they were in for life.

Worse than Trump alone are the groups like the Proud Boys, QAnon, and millions of demented Republicans who have a symbiotic relationship with Trump. Even if we lynched Donald tomorrow, his followers would remain at large and in a position to cause more, maybe much more, trouble.

Before 1/20/21, chances of impeachment are slim--just because such a proceeding is too time-consuming. I doubt if the House & Senate could get themselves organized to perform a summary impeachment. As for felony convictions, there's tax evasion and fraud, a New York State criminal case from which the shit stain cannot pardon himself should he be found guilty.

Trump will remain a dangerous person after 1/20; he should be put in a strait jacket and transferred from the White House to a high security psychiatric facility for treatment of extreme delusional thinking. Perhaps something along the lines of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. They can take his running dog lackeys with him.

"humanely farmed animals" suffer cruelty and abuse — Down The Rabbit Hole

Your argument resembles those of antinatalists: "being born means forced suffering". No matter how you start, you end up with livestock suffering. There's no nuance in your argument.

Animals suffer--period. Wild or farmed, cow or human being, there is no escaping suffering. Abuse can be avoided but suffering can not.

There are solid arguments for vegetarian diets--the strongest one is the ecological argument. Farming animals produces more CO2 than farming crops only. You'd be on solid ground with that approach.

(within limits) suffering is compatible with a good life--for any animal, human or other. Suffering isn't compatible with some rose-tinted "perfect life", which is OK, because there is no such thing as a "perfect life" for any creature, anywhere.

it does appear that these animals possess sufficient instinct and awareness to find all of this very unpleasant — Mijin

I think what you said is true. Their capacity to suffer is why farming should be humane. Foie gras is an egregious example of cruelty. Also egregious is boxing in pigs. The methods used in high-volume chicken raising operations (as well as turkey) are appalling. And so on.

Corporate farming, which maximizes the intensity of resource utilization and output (space, feed, meat, eggs, milk) is the problem. We do not have to go back to the pre-WWII (or maybe pre-WWI) model of very small family farms of 160-200 acres, 100 pigs, a flock of very free-range birds, and 30 to 40 cows. Then pigs had optional access to outdoors, even in cold winter months. Ditto for chickens. Geese live outside all winter. There's not much for a cow to do outside when the ground is frozen, but they were let out while the barn was cleaned. Doing that would require at least 20% of the population to take up agriculture. That is not going to happen.

I would like to see the size of individual hog, fowl, beef, and dairy operations scaled back to a large extent. This would require more labor, more barns, more barnyards, and more pasture land. The total amount of feed would not change very much. Yes, the cost would rise, but the end product would be healthier and more humane.

Beef raised on pasture (In the summer) and hay (in the winter) without grain generally have fewer infections and harbor far fewer pathogenic bacteria. It takes longer to reach full weight, though. that's OK.

Mega-animal operations are unhealthy for humans and animals. A hog, for instance, produces about as much fecal matter per day as an adult human does. Very, very few hog farms dispose of hog manure in a safe manner. Imagine 100,000 people living in a small county with no sanitary sewers.

— Stanley Fish — Wayfarer

Is this the same Fish that Camille Paglia characterized as a "totalitarian tinkerbell"?

'religious people as opposed to secular people' already injects an air of adversity into the discussion. — Wayfarer

It seems like secularists and religionists have opposed each other for quite some time.

I am unanimously in opposition to theocracies of any kind. I'm equally against religious viewpoints getting their hog's snout into the secular statehouse. Wishy-washy religion (like mainstream-protestantism) is less harm-prone than turbo-catholicism, the fecal-fundamentalism of either Christianity or Islam, not to pardon the religions not mentioned.

Secular governments are not supposed to engage with religion, either to advance or repress it. But the overheated extreme is a risk to secularism, even if there is no risk of theocracy. NGOs, however, are not excluded from engaging with religion. I'd like to see more and vigorous advocacy of secularism to counter the hog snout trying to get the whole pig into statehouses.

Of course for both there is a continuum of views, individual by individual. And secularity vs. religiosity have contended with each other for far longer than identity politics have been in play. Like, French Revolution?

As noted above, "secularism" and "religious" are vague terms. "religious" can cover everything from people who are vaguely and slightly spiritual to the rigidly devout who pray, attend religious services daily, and read scripture. "Secular" runs the same gamut on the other side.

Actually, though, a lot of secular people are religious and a lot of religious people are secular. Conundrum? Contradiction in terms? Nonsense? No, because in (most) western societies secularism is the dominant principle of society which, by design, leaves room for religious practice--as long as it doesn't impinge on secularism. So, in France the largely secular society keeps religious out of state affairs (no crucifixes or hijabs in school, for instance). In the US, where religious participation is higher than in most states, the borders between religion and state are policed by both sides.

How can religious people be secular? They don't expect the state to fulfill specific religious objectives, such as evangelizing the population or restricting activities they consider sinful (like drinking, gambling, non-marital and gay sex, etc.). What religious people can do, and sometimes do quite vigorously, is pressure the state to perform social programs that benefit the whole.

That said, there are exceptions; the biggest one is the struggle to allow, or deny, abortions which on one side is a secular principle, and on the other side a decidedly spiritual one. Gay rights, even gay tolerance, is another secular-religious fight.

For what it's worth, the older term, "natural philosophy", became "science" in the 19th century (or maybe later in the 18th century, depending). Gradually the the older term (natural philosophy) disappeared and was replaced by the newer term "science" that developed its own methodology and techniques.

Is "science" still part of philosophy? Some say yes, some say no,

At the moment of brain death our consciousness exits stage left and is never again seem on the stage. That's why death is a tragic event: there's nothing after death. Which is why many people heartily believe in a happy heaven afterlife. If you want to make death much worse, you can teach children that there is a ghastly hell, and they will probably spend eternity there because their behavior and thoughts are BAD.

For me, the finality of death adds to the goodness of life. Time goes by so fast when you are alive.

Remember: It's is a once-around world, a once around life. And when you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer. In Heaven there is no beer, which is why we drink it here.

The following are the philosophical views of the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Factory farming is not not inherently cruel and abusive; cruelty and abuse could take place just as easily on a little farm as a very big one. Cruelty and abuse occur in human workplaces and shelters, too.

Animal advocates go off the deep end they equate artificial insemination with rape. I've observed cows being inseminated artificially and it isn't a painful process.

Pork, salmon, tilapia, chickens, turkeys, beef, are all intensively raised. Truly free-range chicken, lamb, beef, pork, or turkey is very hard to come by, and yes, it is much more expensive because there is no economy of scale in raising a couple hundred field-run turkeys or chickens. (fowl are usually raised in batches of thousands)

There is no escape from the costs of feeding billions of people. There are human and environmental costs associated with ALL agriculture, whether the end product fills the bellies of vegans, vegetarians, or carnivores.

Yes. It's ethical to eat beef raised on a grain diet in a feed lot farm. The quality of the beef won't be the same as when it is raised on pastureland and hay (over the winter months). Free range beef can cost $8-$10 a pound.

Well, that was easy enough. You might join TheMadFool in his investigations of nothing. — jgill

He might want to watch vintage Seinfeld episodes about producing a TV show about nothing. One of my favorites.

My original point was just to say, these rates of change are miles away from life before the 1800s and especially before the 1400s. To compare the cultural change in the roman empire with the modern US is all kinds of silly. The Roman empire didn't change as much in all of its life as the US did in just 60 years and that's true of 1900 to 1960 or 1960 to 2020. — Judaka

Very true. The "collapse of the Roman Empire" was a slow-motion event requiring centuries to be complete. The centuries after its demise were times of more slow-motion change (for the most part). The 1066 Norman Invasion of English was an exceptionally high speed event.

Let's make a comparison of 1900 with 1960. In 1900 new technology had changed the way people lived and interacted. Production and distribution of electricity was about to become a common-place thing. Big change. The telephone was changing the way people communicated, as did the telegraph (introduced about 60 years earlier, 1840). Photography was becoming much easier. Radio was becoming a thing (not broadcasts yet, just point to point). Airplanes and automobiles were coming over the horizon. These were all BIG changes.

Take the auto. A car allowed one to move around more easily compared to bicycle, a horse, or on foot. More to the point, a car eventually offered mobile privacy. People could quickly escape the immediate vicinity of family, friends, and onlookers. (Granted, this didn't happen until cars became common and reliable.) This was a huge change with far reaching consequences.

A person living in the first decade of 1900, transported to 1960, would probably find life less comprehensible that a 1960s transplant to 2020. But your point stands.

But so does the idea that in reverse, a 1960s transplant to 1900, or a 2020 transplant to 1960 would NOT find life incomprehensible. When you read material from 1900, 120 years later, it makes perfect sense. Sure, characters in a story might navigate a dark house by candle light instead of electric light, but... one can understand that.

I'll grant you that language changes, sometimes significantly. I find 18th century prose more accessible than a lot of the more recent Victorian prose. Style of expression does change. Granted.

As you said, we'll have to agree to disagree, but I think you have supported your view, and I think I have too. The leaves on a tree change every fall, but it's the same tree with new leaves in the spring. Languages add and subtract, but they stay the same language, at least over the short run of a few centuries. You can understand Shakespeare. You have no difficulty understand 400 year old language when Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, part 2, says "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Right?

On the one hand, we will have to agree to disagree. On the other hand, you did a fine job of supporting your position in this post. I looked at the seven links you provided and found them compellingly informative. (Some of the information was familiar to me, some not.).

Uncle Karl (Marx) said that the conditions of culture depend on/are caused by the nature of material production. What and how stuff is produced, in other words. We can over-generalize this truism, but it seems like the critical change in production during and following the 1960s was miniaturization of electronic parts -- tubes to transistors, individual transistors to printed circuits, and ever-smaller but more powerful printed circuits. Programmable computers existed in 1960, and they weighed a ton. in 1980 they weighed a few pounds. Today the computing power in a cell phone so far exceeds that of a 1960 computer that a comparison is difficult to make. Most of the components in a cell phone existed in a [much) larger-form.

I was involved in educational technology in the late 1960s and 1970s. What we were trying to do with media [remote supply of educational material] didn't begin to become feasible until the 'personal computer' of the 1980s, and the World Wide Web became casually usable around 20 years ago. The key was miniaturization of components, and the resulting increasing in power.

A lot of what you are talking about is the result of miniaturization squared of electronic components.

Other changes of which you speak are the result of changes in wealth flows which got under way at the end of the post-WWII boom, starting in 1973. Domestic production (and jobs) began to decline; working class wages both stagnated and declined. Changes in tax laws benefitted a minority of high-end earners at the expense of low-end earners. Et cetera.

These material changes made it impossible for most people to continue the single-earner nuclear family model, resulting in a lot more social change (and perhaps decay).

So I'll grant you a major win here: things have changed a lot since 1960.

See my next post.

The archetypal experience of culture in the 1960s is very different than in 2020, few things have remained the same. — Judaka

Your position on 1960 vs. 2020 is just plain wrong, because:

You are missing the fact of cultural continuity.

The 'current' economy driving western civilization (be that French, Australian, or Finn) has been in force for at least the last 150 years--and longer. products change, corporate names are refreshed, companies merge, new factories are built for new technologies (transistors instead of tubes, then integrated circuits etched onto silicon, then...), management changes, consumer preferences change. Land barges with fins, then without fins; smaller cars vs. big cars; back to big cars; gas powered cars to electric cars.

Saks 5th Avenue was founded in 1860. It's still in business, but it is owned by the Hudsons Bay Company, which was founded in 1670. My favorite beer is Stella Artois, a Belgian pilsener; the brewery was founded in 1366. There are quite a few companies that have been in business for hundreds of years.

The language has not changed. New formal words and new slang has been added; other words have been dropped. Grammar remains the same. Pronunciation of words (accents) are by their nature always changing, but the meaning--however the word is spoken--changes very slowly, 999 times out of 1000. One might take a walk around the block; in 1960 the word was pronounced the way it is spelled. In some areas (like Detroit) the pronunciation is changing to something closer to 'bleck'.

While specieshood poses limits on what we can do (literally), social styles and moral norms change fairly rapidly, but not drastically. You might be less likely to be hanged for murder in 2020 than in 1960, but murder is about as frowned on now as then. Ditto for a lot of other crimes. The use of recreational drugs waxes and wanes over time, and for the most part you could get as high in 1960 as in 2020. Birth control which became widely available in the 1960s changed the sexual equation (to some extent), and that change is still in effect.

Life has changed more for women than heterosexual men; that is a significant change. Life for gay men has changed a great deal. Sex, however, has not changed; there are no new ways. What works in 2020 will work in 1960.

Changes come and go. Some people had groceries delivered to their homes in 1960. Later that became much less common; then it became more common again. Amazon may seem revolutionary, but in 1960 there were mail order catalogues from Sears, Wards, Spiegel. et al, selling a huge array of goods. At one time Sears even sold pre-fabricated houses; not mini-houses, full sized ones.

Maybe you spend too much time among your own age group. Get out more.

If you like to read, try something from the late 18th century--Boswell, for example. He was a lawyer, man about town, friend of Samuel Johnson. Better yet, try Samuel Pepys, 1633 1703. He was another man on the make, man about town. He kept a diary (in cypher) which now makes great reading. His daily comings and goings 300 years ago aren't all that much different than what a similar socially/sexually active guy might be doing now.

Here's a joke from 1960. It's a long, formulaic joke, but I am confident you will be able to understand all the words in it, and might even get the joke; you might even smile slightly.

A fisherman’s joke

The day after his wife disappeared in a kayaking accident, a Claddaghduff, an Irish man answered his door to find a grim-faced Constable & one waiting in the front yard. "We're sorry, Mr. O’ Flynn, but we have some information about your dear wife, Maureen" said one of the officers.

"Tell me! Did you find her?" Michael Patrick O’Flynn asked. The constables looked at each other and one said, "We have some bad news, some good news, and some really great news. Which would you like to hear first?

"Fearing the worst, Mr. O’ Flynn said, "Give me the bad news first." The constable said, "I'm sorry to tell you, sir, but early this morning we found your poor wife's body in the bay." "Lord sufferin' Jesus and Holy Mother of God!" exclaimed O’ Flynn. Swallowing hard, he asked,

"What could possibly be the good news?" The constable continued, "When we pulled the late, departed poor Maureen up, she had 12 of the best-looking Atlantic lobsters that you have ever seen clinging to her. Haven't seen lobsters like that since the 1960's, and we feel you are entitled to a share in the catch."

Stunned, Mr. O’ Flynn demanded, "Glory be to God, if that's the good news, then what's the really great news?

The constable replied, "We're gonna pull her up again tomorrow."

Cultural / Societal / Civilizational collapse could be defined as:

the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. — ssu

This definition fits the 'fall of the Roman Empire' fairly well. In 476 Odoacer rang down the curtain on the Roman Empire (according to many historians). It may have been this German fellow who sent the regalia of Roman office to Constantinople, recognizing that the western Roman government was defunct.

'Roman identity' didn't evaporate over night, of course; but it did begin to become less specific. The city of Rome was physically deteriorating, and if I remember, Ravenna, NE of Rome, was the occasion of government. The western provinces were undergoing their own transitions. The center did not hold, but the empire didn't descend into darkness--the dark ages.

In Britain, the Roman establishment left fairly quickly, and the empty property was abandoned. The native locals, by and large, did not move in and redecorate. For one thing, they were preoccupied by another aspect of the decline of the empire -- population movement. Two German groups moved to Britain (the Angles and Saxons) which accelerated the demise of the Gaelic culture. The Gaelic people (in England, anyway) weren't wiped out--they were gradually submerged into the AS / Viking population.

Holy Mother Church, operating out of Rome in Western Europe, mounted and sustained a long effort to convert pagans to Christianity which was more or less successful. The collapse of Roman government and military, the movement of people, and the infusion of a vigorous new religion are all part of the collapse of western empire and the rise of Western Civilization. Languages changed too. Latin was localized, becoming Italian, French, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, et al. Many of the former local languages (Gaulish, Frankish, etc.) ceased and desisted.

Other civilizations--in the Western Hemisphere, for instance--suffered a fast collapse after the Spanish/Portuguese/English conquests. Different than the Roman collapse, but collapsed, never the less.

Western European Civilization appears to be neither declining nor decaying. In some ways it has become the global civilization (industrialism, capitalism, centralized. managerial states, media, trade, et cetera). Has it peaked? Too early to tell. Will it now decline if it has peaked? IF it has peaked, then it has to either plateau or decline, because that's what the word "PEAK" requires.

What is cultural collapse? — Judaka

That is the question, isn't it.

We probably can't see it except through a long-range rear-view mirror.

Is our culture decaying? — ssu

Maybe, but how would we know? Is there some reliable measure of cultural health analogous to individual physical health--blood pressure, white blood cell count, the ratio between high density lipids (good) and low density lipids (bad), weight, etc.? In what year did "our culture" begin? What is "cultural decay"? Is decay different than change? Yada, yada, yada.

I suspect that a lot of people thought their culture was decaying even as it was gathering steam, ever since a novel method of knapping rocks into tools was introduced on March 5th, 70,258 BCE.

Go back or forward sixty years and there'll be no familiarity, you'll feel like a stranger in your own country. — Judaka

@Judaka, who is 20 something, thinks a changing culture becomes indecipherable over a 60 year span; maybe in less time than that.

My father died at 102 in 2007. He grew up farming with horses. He had fond memories of air shows where a plane was brought into town on a rail car and assembled. The pilot flew around, did some tricks, and then the plane was taken apart and moved to another small town. (The range of the planes was short.) A few years later (1927) Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris, non stop. During his life radio, television, computers, jet passenger planes, men landing on the moon, distant planet fly-bys, organ transplants, and so on and so forth became commonplace.

Q: How did people communicate in 1960 without cell phones?
A: When they were away from home they could use pay phones, which back then were everywhere. 5¢ or 10¢ was all that it took to make a local call. Phone booths usually had a very thick white-page and a yellow-page phone directory, listing just about everybody in the city. If there was no phone book, directory assistance was free. The sound quality of the calls were almost always at least very good, but there were no apps. If you wanted to take pictures, you used a camera with a role of film in it. If you wanted to know how to get to some location, you looked at a printed map. If you wanted to know what was happening, you bought a newspaper.

Judaka: borrow a book from the library, or buy one to read on your phone--something like The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren, published in1949. There is some slang you might not get, but I am confident that you will be able to understand 1949 English, and that the low-lifes depicted in 1949 Chicago will be comprehendible. Or try Incident At Owl Creek Bridge, a short story by Ambrose Bierce published in 1890. It's a great story and again I predict that you will be able to understand 1890 English.

Read more history. You might be surprised to discover that Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln both put their pants on one leg at a time. Life in ancient Egypt MIGHT be incomprehensible, but you'd be able to understand what people were doing in Boston in 1776.

But H/Gs practiced limited agriculture too, and so do everyday modern people in their gardens — darthbarracuda

H/Ging goes back maybe 200,000 years. What evidence have you heard of that they were gardening (or some sort of limited agriculture) that far back? And how do you define 'limited agriculture'?

H/G had to be very good observers of plant and animal life in order to successfully hunt and forage. They probably knew a thing or two about how plants and animals reproduce, and maybe they planted a nut every now and then. But so do squirrels, and we don't think of them as farmers.

Agriculture is by definition sedentary; how do you square the necessary travel of hunter gatherers with a settled lifestyle? Like H/Ging, agriculture demands skill and tools. l don't have any special knowledge about this; I just don't see H/G and agriculture very compatible.

The question of good faith lending, admissions, and awarding degrees is complex.

High school advisors should themselves be aware, and help students be aware that universities look out for their own interests first. Admission, even awarding scholarships, doesn't mean that a useful or remunerative degree and satisfying career is in the offing. Universities require solid enrollment figures for income first, and as a general justification or their raison d'être.

Education costs have been rising for a good 40 years, so it should not come as a surprise that degrees cost money.

Whether a degree was worth the money may not be obvious for several years (or more) after graduation. I have a bachelors degree in English and a graduate degree in educational psychology. The English degree had much less immediate job-getting value than the graduate degree, even though the BA was worth much more in terms of learning. In the longer run, the English major (and general education) was worth it many times over in personal value. (I graduated in 1968)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts what fields have expanding, stable, and declining job numbers. Honest advising should steer students who will need to earn their way in the world away from majors which lead to few jobs. As much as one might like dance, French poetry, or art there just aren't many jobs in those areas. If one is independently wealthy, majoring in underwater basket weaving (an old cliche from my student days) is as good a choice as any.

Credit and debt education must occur In high school. I think a lot of student borrows have a very poor understanding of just how difficult discharging a $30,000 loan can be, especially when they want to take on more debt for a car and a home. Never mind a $50,000 loan, or more.

College was affordable when I was a student (1960s) because the state subsidized education, making fees quite affordable even for students who were kind of poor. One could get a work-study job on campus which would go a long ways towards paying for fees, for instance. The states withdrew from higher education subsidy under increasing demands for tax reduction. The burden of cost was shifted from the collective to individual families.

Would that cabal be called "the aristocracy"? I think that is a bit too conspirational. Farming and cities emerging because of their utility (and necessity) is likely more closer to the truth. — ssu

Right. That's what I think, too. The theory floated in Against The Grain is interesting, but I don't see an aristocracy, an elite, or a state existing before there was the material basis to support that kind of expensive socio-political organization. It seems likely that people gradually drifted into settled agriculture because there were some advantages to that kind of lifestyle, compared to exclusive hunting and gathering.

Once there was a solid material foundation on which elites could build, they did. And in retrospect it my look like the elite seduced the people into farming. That idea is not only conspiratorial, how would the elite have known that there even was any potential, and how much, in farming?

The technology of production developed before any social consequences could exist.

Many of us 'old people' (past 70, at least) find that it is difficult to get rid of stuff--not just really good stuff, but junk too. It seems like anything that has been on the table or counter for more than a day has gained some sort of entitlement. So millions of us are fighting with accumulating paper that we don't desire, actually do not want, but can't get rid of.

That might look like "attachment" but it is really a problem of perspective.

Quite a few people became addicted quickly after their first encounter with alcohol, meth, cocaine, weed, heroin, or something else. They didn't so much desire these substances as their brains were so constituted to be a trap ready to close once the substance came along. Some people are biochemically prone to addiction. For some more complicated psychological reason, some people are prone to become overly attached to other people.

Granted, people can get addicted by patient effort; I liked the idea of smoking enough to keep at it until I was addicted. Stupid, but advertising and peer influence works. I haven't smoked for 25 years, but I still have the urge sometimes.

Then there is GREED--one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Some people desire more (gold; bitcoins; real estate; pounds or dollars or Euros or whatever measure o wealth is handy). Let's call greed an attachment to things of recognized value. That's a problem with real moral consequences which is (presumably) NOT a problem of brain chemistry (alcoholism), inability to decide what to throw out (old age), psychological dependency disorders or OCD, etc. People who collect bits of string and add it to their big ball are not sinning, even if they are greedy for more bits of string. They are just weird.

Many attachments are normal, desirable, necessary, and good, as long as they doesn't become a neurosis (like parents who are attached to the desire for a child to be a violin prodigy who isn't). We should be attached to our homeland, family, faith, alma mater (send a donation), local community, and so on--in reasonable proportion. People who are overly attached to the Green Bay Packers or Miami Dolphins are just tedious, not a moral problem.

Oh, and Merry Christmas.

We know now that hunter-gathering, swiddening, pastoralism and the like are comparatively easier and healthier lifestyles. — darthbarracuda

That's what I've read, too.

Agriculture requires a lot more intensive and extensive cooperative labor than hunting and gathering. The cycles of nature produced sufficient food for hunting and gathering. Both lifestyles require sharp intellectual skills, and the skills of finding appropriate foods in the wild must have prepared people to succeed at agriculture. They had to be skilled botanists to find food plants and avoid poisoning themselves.

The Western Hemisphere was settled around the time that agriculture arose. The Amerindian people identified several fairly unprepossessing plants like the primitive tomato, teosinte (maize), potato, and so on and developed them into strains which could sustain large populations. That was a bit tricky, because a lot of the food crops the Amerindians developed are in the nightshade family of plants which can be quite toxic (tobacco, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, pepper) because of the alkaloid solanine, which is toxic in high concentrations. This had to have taken quite a bit of time to accomplish (centuries, millennia). Primitive tomatoes were the size of currents. Seeing a corn cob in the teosinte grass was a tremendous leap of imagination. Further, crop growing diffused north and south where there were starkly different bands of climate.

I'm not sure when Amerindians developed the first urban / state societies; but smaller village settlements must have developed early on, since plant breeding wouldn't seem to go well with a highly mobile lifestyle.

Lure people into grain growing. Where did the state get the idea of agriculture from? — Brett

I collapsed my incomplete understanding of undigested ideas in a book I read part of a while ago. We lazy philosophers sometimes do that. Besides which, all that isn't my theory.

Clearly the State could not precede the idea of settling down and growing grain in place of the H/G way of life. People had to be settled in place before even the simplest state could form. There had to have been a period (measured in millennia) of transition where people gradually shifted from H/G to Ag. We had to learn how to do it; and besides grain ("man can not live by bread alone") we had to find the various vegetable crops to supply basic nutrition in a settled community no longer foraging over a large area.

Agriculture preceded cities, too. Jericho was established around 9,000 years ago. I think agriculture must have existed for a while in a less settled form.

I don't know much about Jericho 9500 years ago. Uruk dates back to a more recent 6,500 years ago give or take a little. Uruk was one of several city states that rose, controlled the surrounding territory, then subsided. It seems like Uruk would fit the idea of a State encouraging agriculture for purposes of taxation, but 6,500 years ago doesn't line up very well with the rise of crop growing.

Maybe the state of the first State was just a bunch of thugs who forced people to work harder and then walked off with the crop. Some people's children prefer the notion that people can't accomplish anything cooperatively without a gang of thieves rising in the ranks and taking over. We do seem to have a tendency to behave like that, but I wasn't there. Had I been, I would hope that I would have been one of the bitter and resentful peasants fanning the flames of discontent.

Against The Current — Bitter Crank

Against the Grain — darthbarracuda

Sorry about that. The frontal lobe proofreader app failed again. Against The Current is a lefty magazine I used to read. Against The Grain is the title I intended to write.

So to react to your original post, early agricultural states were not based on an anxiety about the future and risk-aversion. Complete dependence on agriculture increased the risk of starvation. There was no good reason for anyone working the fields to be doing that, apart from coercion by the state. — darthbarracuda

That might be the case. I wasn't there, but it seems quite possible that some sort of early cabal roped a bunch of dopes into farming.

Agriculture is a high risk activity for individuals, even if not for the larger population. If agriculture is sufficiently expansive, enough food will usually be produced (usually; not always). For the individual farmer, agriculture is a gamble. Too much and not enough rain, rain at the wrong time, air that is too hot, too cold, too dry, too windy, carries too many locusts, disease -- etc. can all ruin an individual farmer's crop and turn food into starvation.

Agriculture was probably harder work than hunting-gathering. Hunter-gatherers were generally fairly healthy and reasonably long-lived, so I have read. They were mobile. They could follow food. Agriculturalists were literally stuck in the ground.

Against The Current (book) suggests that agriculture was the invention of the earliest nascent state which saw in agriculture a way of extracting wealth from peons. Lure people into grain-growing and they would -- of necessity or force -- stay put and produce more food (wealth) than they themselves needed to live. The surplus could be traded by the elite for other stuff.