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i mean, pardon my english but this, the life i'm living is ww1 trench warfare.

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Messages - tyrannosaurus vex

#16
Or Kill Me / Re: Push the button already
June 15, 2020, 08:05:34 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on June 15, 2020, 07:43:02 PM
Quote from: tyrannosaurus vex on June 15, 2020, 06:42:49 PM
As much as I respect everyone in this thread, I'm going to cordially invite every person who feels like it's their job to put words in my mouth to go fuck themselves. At no point did I advocate for returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, nor did I ever dismiss the entire notion of technological progress as a myth or the tangible benefits to modern Western humans of modern Western civilization as a fantasy. I apologize if my implication that hunter-gatherers are not missing out on some fundamental aspect of human existence just because they don't have Skype seemed like a personal attack. It was not one.

I am honestly sitting here trying to puzzle out what you were saying, then.

I am in Western civilization.  I have stuff.  So do people in Thailand and Japan and Africa.  Some of them don't have as much stuff, but they are feverishly trying to get that stuff.  Not because they have been brainwashed by mean old Western Civilization™, but because they are human and humans want stuff.

I imagine I should feel guilty for having stuff and wanting more stuff.  I find that to be absurd, considering that my job literally requires me to find ways to kill every living human as efficiently as possible, and I don't feel guilty about that.  Fuck the humans.  They aren't my goddamn people, and they can all SHUT UP and maybe DIE.

I am not quite as cynical as that. For 20,000+ years, people who were every bit as anatomically modern and cognitively able as we are lived a whole different way in the Pre-Columbian Americas. Obviously it wasn't some idyllic Eden where everyone was happy and nobody wept and there were no problems - there were wars, andd famines, and diseases, and assholes and murders (probably). But they operated under a whole different set of basic assumptions and didn't engage in the same sort of resource hoarding and environmentally catastrophic exploitation that we take as a given today. They lacked access to anything we would recognize as basic modern amenities and infrastructure, but they had no concept of those things so they were no less satisfied with their lives than we are with ours.

I'm /not/ painting some bullshit picture about how we should give up on civilization and return to that. Im just saying that human beings are not actually hardwired to destroy themselves and their environment, and that what we think of as civilization is neither inevitable nor "superior", or even "more advanced," except by our own standards that only apply subjectively to us. And the reason I bring it up isn't to say we ought to mimick hunter gatherers, but only to be aware of our prior when we think about what is and isn't human nature and whether we are either doomed to blown ourselves up or destined to overcome: neither of those outcomes is assured merely by virtue of our human DNA.

#17
Or Kill Me / Re: Push the button already
June 15, 2020, 06:42:49 PM
As much as I respect everyone in this thread, I'm going to cordially invite every person who feels like it's their job to put words in my mouth to go fuck themselves. At no point did I advocate for returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, nor did I ever dismiss the entire notion of technological progress as a myth or the tangible benefits to modern Western humans of modern Western civilization as a fantasy. I apologize if my implication that hunter-gatherers are not missing out on some fundamental aspect of human existence just because they don't have Skype seemed like a personal attack. It was not one.
#18
Or Kill Me / Re: Push the button already
June 15, 2020, 04:19:52 AM
You're not hearing me at all. I will definitely grant you that's because I'm scatterbrained as fuck these days for my own reasons and bad at organizing anything I try to say, and that's why I put this here instead of shitting it out on Facebook or something. I am too apt to go off on some diatribe about anything.

That said, I'm not seeing anything from you that counters the actual thing I'm trying to say, which is the myth of the Long Arc of History being a crutch used by too many people to excuse their lack of activism, on the grounds that progress is somehow inevitable and therefore not incumbent upon them individually to put in any effort. Obviously this does not mean you or probably anyone on this board, it means [people]. Like, in general. I am only saying that history, contrary to popular conceit, has no inherent bias toward iustice.

#19
Or Kill Me / Re: Push the button already
June 15, 2020, 03:29:52 AM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on June 15, 2020, 02:36:29 AM
Quote from: tyrannosaurus vex on June 15, 2020, 02:15:05 AM

As for your specific example, clean water and sanitation are better if we take it for granted that longer lifespans and higher population density are better.

They are.  Cities exist as a means to gather resources.  You have an objectively higher chance of living to be old if you live in a modern city.

Who says living to be old, cursing the traffic and hating your job and dodging stray cop bullets the whole time, is objectively preferable to living off the land with a few other people for a shorter time? If modern city living is objectively better, why don't all those tribes in Africa or Brazil give up and move into apartments? Why do we complain about the conquest of the American West? We brought Civilization after all, so why did the natives resist?

But more to the point, will what we have built lead inexorably to Fully Automated Gay Space Communism just because it's easier to live to 60 now than it used to be yo live to 40? And is that trajectory guaranteed by no more than the fact that "so far, so good"?

#20
Or Kill Me / Re: Push the button already
June 15, 2020, 02:15:05 AM
CNO, yeah I'm easily distracted and love my rabbit trails, this will probably never change

To boil my basic point down to the bones, it's only that too many people take progress (social, specifically) for granted and use that as an excuse to avoid engaging directly to make the world better. Society evolves, but there's no guarantee that it will evolve to something *better* just because it evolves. And the idea that modern Western culture is objectively superior to what we think of as "primitive" societies, just because it is the sort of thing that it is.

As for your specific example, clean water and sanitation are better if we take it for granted that longer lifespans and higher population density are better. That's one of the kinds of assumption I'm talking about in the other thread of my argument. Not all societies have decided those are necessarily superior goals, and yet the people in those societies are on average no worse off *by their own subjective standards* than we are (otherwise they too would have developed that technology).

To be clear - I'm not saying we should all join some anarcho-primitivist commune, only that we should be conscious of the standards we use to measure cultural achievement because the default one we are handed that says "people in modern America are automatically more civilized than people in the deep Amazon" can be used to justify horrors.
#21
Or Kill Me / Re: Push the button already
June 15, 2020, 12:44:04 AM
Yeah of course good things come from our advances. We solve tons of problems for tons of people  and I'm super happy you've been one of them. I'm not saying anything about that. I'm saying the problems we solve are problems we created for ourselves in the first place, and in solving them we generate more problems to solve later. It isn't about whether there is or isn't a grand design, it's about whether by virtue of being Homo Sapiens, we are predestined to build societies that advance socially and technologically toward some future where we finally solve all the problems (or even all the ones we are currently aware of).

Mental health and loving communities are absolutely necessities for human life. And no, happiness isn't all there is to it, though I think you're defining that word differently than I am. But you don't need the Internet to solve those problems until you've damaged billions of people with economic and religious and industrial exploitation to begin with. Now that we HAVE created those problems, then OF COURSE we are morally obligated to solve them. But that isn't to say that we are destined to continue solving them, or that our progress will continue just because it is progress.

My original point, if you read it, isn't even that we should abandon our progress - only that we shouldn't take it for granted, shouldn't assume that (for example) racial injustice will inevitably be rectified just because it seems for now that history is aimed in that direction.
#22
Or Kill Me / Re: Push the button already
June 15, 2020, 12:25:06 AM
I mean, the basis of your rebuttal only has meaning within the context of a society that values our brand of technological progress and views that as the goal. Not all societies see it that way, and in fact the ones that don't tend to be more stable and much longer lasting. In the overall course of humans' existence on Earth, the trajectory of Western Civilization is more likely to be a statistical curiosity than an inevitable march toward galactic colonization or something.
#23
Or Kill Me / Re: Push the button already
June 15, 2020, 12:19:12 AM
Yeah, we have made lots of progress technologically, but what effect has that progress had on the average life? We can do things that our ancestors would see as magical, but is the average person in modern America more or less likely to see themselves as happy and fulfilled as the average pre-Columbian Native American? Or the average member of uncontacted tribe in the Amazon? My point isn't that we haven't made advances or that we don't have powers that we didn't always have, but that what we call "progress" is neither inevitable nor particularly helpful.
#24
Or Kill Me / Re: Push the button already
June 14, 2020, 11:22:19 PM
Quote from: Nyborj the Priest on June 14, 2020, 11:17:49 PM
Why did you post this here instead of scrawling it on tree bark with a pointy stone dipped in beetroot juice?
This forum is the current incarnation of that.
#25
Or Kill Me / Push the button already
June 14, 2020, 10:52:12 PM
One of the most insidious and dangerous assumptions we have is the silly idea that human history has a direction. That in some meaningful way, life in the 21st century is fundamentally different (even "better") than life in, say, the 14th century, or the 21st century BCE for that matter. That human events follow a more or less predictable (at least in hindsight) trajectory from "primitive" to "advanced", and that it does this because of some sort of natural law that governs all kinds of progress.

This idea is pure bunk, and should be stamped out with extreme prejudice wherever you see it. It is the kernel at the center of the centrist's inaction in the face of injustice, the unfounded presupposition behind violent wars of "regime change" and "nation building", and the morally vacant justification for colonialist thinking. It is the reason we are taught that the evils of slavery and genocide are "in the past" while the forces that drive them simmer in communities around the world.

History has no arc. It is not a story about a protagonist species who learn and grow. It has never been guaranteed that tomorrow will be more just for you than today, or that the next century will bring more opportunity for your descendants than the last one had for your ancestors. This should be plain to see as we watch the entire allegedly "free" world slip farther every day into the same patterns of mistakes and collapse that have recurred time and again since anyone bothered to remember anything.

Even when disaster is averted, for all our apparent progress we have never actually made a difference in what it means to be human. Sure, we have the power to blow up the planet, the power to fling ourselves uselessly into orbit, the power to talk to each other across insurmountable distances. But so what if we can do all this, but give up the ability to feed our children, or the time to appreciate a sunset once in a while, or the courage to speak to our own neighbors? What have we gained, exactly, and why do we imagine that to be "progress"?
#26
..... #LadyG
#27
Aneristic Illusions / Re: So about these riots...
June 04, 2020, 08:12:57 PM
so real question... are the protests more or less bottled up and suppressed, or is there just general agreement in the media not to cover them anymore?
#28
Aneristic Illusions / Re: So about these riots...
June 04, 2020, 06:02:11 PM
Quote from: chaotic neutral observer on June 04, 2020, 04:32:56 PM
This has some of the ingredients for a nascent coup.  If congress and/or the senate act to curtail Trump, I expect things will fall apart quickly.

The same exact forces that allow destabilized developing nations to fall victim to coups instigated by outside (or inside) actors are at play here. Nothing about being the most advanced and most powerful rogue state with a precarious balance of power makes the balance any less precarious. If we didn't have 200+ years of inertia behind the current system we probably would have had 6 coups in the last 2 years. What really bugs me is that at this point I'd actually be perfectly fine with a coup, as long as it was carried out by our own military and not some mercenaries hired by whoever
#29
Aneristic Illusions / Re: So about these riots...
June 03, 2020, 12:32:25 PM
Apparently Maryland has accepted Trump's offer of military help
#30
Aneristic Illusions / Re: So about these riots...
June 02, 2020, 11:10:41 PM
well someone is leaving nice tidy pallets of bricks at these places far from any construction zones and I'm not prepared to believe that the officers who are out watching public spaces 24/7 are just going to let someone do that right before a protest without some kind of shady motive.