[QuickTidal]

So I was prompted to make this thread as I feel like most of us are relatively knowledgable and intelligent, with a diversity of opinions that we might talk about the state of the world right now.

Note: I was triggered into this by hearing that story of the 50 people who organized themselves into a mob to raid a Nordstrom in LA, and my brain went "Well, that's not normal and what pushed people to do this?" and the answer my brain suggested as a possible "why" was, at best uncomfortable from a societal standpoint.

So things suck, right? I mean pretty universally. I can speak to Canada, but I'm sure this applies to many of the places we are from and live in. The mass trauma even known as the Pandemic has affected us all in varying and different ways...but it's hard to argue that for about 3 years we all went through something unprecedented and it left many lingering affects on us both mental and physical.

Starting with that as a BASE, is already a fucking trip...but it only gets worse from there.

Inflation is bad everywhere, and in most cases this can be traced not to some socio-economic factor, or some pattern or cycle, but instead to the wealth-hoarders and greed. Galen Weston (who owns most of Canadian grocery/drug stores AND many of the brands/vendors themselves) didn't up prices due to the pandemic supply chain issues and then drop them back down after that was no longer a factor...he upped them just because he could, cause he's a rich AF Nepo-baby and wanted him and his shareholders to make unending infinite profit. Our inflation has actually gone down in the last little while a bit... but you would never know it because the prices are still going up on everything.

This bleeds into another point, that fabled element of modern capitalism, the phantoms of "infinite growth"...it is no longer good enough to make enough as a corporation to pay your employees, cover your expenses and make a decent profit...now those profit graphs need to point up every year, year over year that MUST apparently increase....or your business is considered failing. This once again tracks back to the exact same thing as the above, wealth-hoarding shareholders demanding money to be a constant and increasing flow.

Oligopolies rule the roost in Canada and abroad:

- Want to travel within Canada by Air? Cool, you gotta deal with Air Canada who charges extortionist prices for a flight from Toronto to Montreal (for example)...and what happens with more little guy airlines come into the fold to try to diversify the options? Gets bought out by Air Canada.
- Want to ship something? Cool, you gotta deal with Canada Post who charge you an AUTOMATIC $15+ on anything larger than a LETTER. Decimating anyones chances of having a viable seller business by mail in Canada.
- Want to get a cell phone? Cool, you gotta deal with our Bi-fold carriers Rogers & Bell who both charge you some of the highest prices in the WORLD for telecom services...want to try to avoid them and pick smaller guys for your cell phones? Yeah, you can but they ALL have to use Bell and Rogers lines cause there is no other infrastructure being built.
- Want to get internet service? Cool, you gotta deal with our bifold ISP's Rogers & Bell who both charge you some of the highest prices in there world for internet services...want to try to avoid them and pick the smaller guys for your cell phones? Yeah, you can but they ALL have to use Bell (Fibre) and Rogers (DSL) lines cause there is no other infrastructure being built.
- Want to get groceries? Cool, you gotta deal with out tri-fold mass corporations Weston, Empire, or Metro who charge you some of the highest prices for groceries in the world...and have even been caught MORE THAN ONCE colluding together to fix high prices on certain items...want to try to avoid them and pick the small guys? Can't, Weston OWNS about 60% of the smaller guys, Empire owns 30% of the rest, with Metro owning the remaining 10%....the free market is never going to sort itself out with things like this. Weston and Empire buy out/take over ANY of the smaller ones that start up and try to diversify the goods.
- Want to use a bank? Cool, you gotta deal with one of only five banking institutions in the country, and economic constraints hinder other banking institutions from joining the market and competing with these corporations.
- Want to use oil and gas? Cool, you gotta deal with Husky Energy, Imperial Oil, Nexen, Petro-Canada, Shell Canada, Suncor Energy, Syncrude Canadaor, Talisman Energy ALL of whom take their marching orders from OPEC....a group of people who were proven only last year to have sat in a room and talked about increasing prices for no other reason than BECAUSE THEY COULD.
- Want to buy concert tickets? Cool, you gotta deal with Ticketmaster who set pretty insane prices for even lesser artists concerts. Wouldn't it be easier for the venues to sell their own tickets? It would be and it used to be, but then Ticketmaster BOUGHT the owners of the vast majority of Venues when they merged with Live Nation...and the only time ANYONE has ever fought against this clear and unprecedented oligopoly (Pearl Jam), Ticketmaster/Live Nation basically bought OR Doomed ANY smaller venue for daring to sell cheaper tickets by telling Major Artists and Record companies that if they set up gigs at those smaller venues that they would gatekeep their artists from them. So they own the only ticket-seller and all the major venues in town.
- Want to travel by rail outside the GTA? Cool, you gotta deal with VIA Rail as they are the only game in town and charge prices that are worse than air Canada does for FLIGHTS....and when you complain? Well, there is no infrastructure for transit like rail so you have to use the only corridors that exist, as no one will buy more and thus allowing other competitors to even EXIST.


Now, what could be done to solve much of this? The governments (Federal and/or Provincial) COULD either set up laws/rules or reinstate old laws that have since been removed (see Scalping essentially being legal these days when it used to be quite illegal) to prevent oligopolies and foster a wider are market with much more varied choices...but they don't. I expect much of that is due to lobbying by the money behind these EXACT companies to make sure no changes occur that hurt their bottom line, and some of it is due to the desire to stay in power for some governments, amongst other issues. But no one is doing much of anything to stop anyone.

Housing is another biggie. In Canada it's EGREGIOUS. Real Estate makes up the majority of our GDP. It's a stock market. You get that? Our whole fucking economy is propped up by a bubble of an imaginary infinitely growing housing industry. The people in power know that if they force that bubble to burst, the ENTIRE Canadian economy would crash and they want to avoid that. Even putting hardcore rules in place for taxing multi-property owners and big hedge funds that own massive property would be untenable as the big boys would pull out of their (up till now) guaranteed investment. The problem with kicking this particular can down the road is that eventually that bubble WILL burst. Economically it CANNOT go up forever. At some point the snap will occur. The offshoot problem is that many people will say "It has to go up, it will always go up, it won't crash, they've been predicting a burst for 25+ years now...tell me another one"....yes it has been going up for 25+ years....but it's till a bubble based on housing being an INVESTMENT that was enticing to investors....it stands on nothing else. And no one is going to be buying houses when they are 1.5-2million STARTING everywhere...So when that bubble DOES burst, the catastrophe will make the 2008 financial crash in the States look like a fucking cakewalk. This whole country will collapse under that weight into what I assume will be a depression. So no one wants to fix it...because fixing it means crashing the economy. The bank of Canada is trying to slow walk this by pushing up the interest rate and forcing a recession....this isn't working becuase the investment is still not poisoned enough for the big boys (like Blackrock) to bail.

The next two biggest contributors on our list for GDP are manufacturing and the financial sector (banks, another oligopoly).......brother......thats not a healthy country economically by anyone's definition, that's three investors in a fucking trench coat.

And add a little spice to the whole thing, the Boomers as a generation are not naturally dying off fast enough. Callous as that may sound, it's simply a valid data point. The Boomers hold the VAST majority of the wealth in this country and south of the border, be it in investments, or even just in housing they bought for pennies 4 decades ago. They are also CLINGING to the jobs they should have long retired from because the world they created (in which they were given every opportunity to get all the things they wanted, the things they told US Millennials we could also have if we just worked hard like they did) doesn't exist anymore, and they are being financially pressed upon as much as we are, so they are staying in jobs LONG past retirement age to try to make sure that their parachute will open...but they've left none of the rest of us parachutes as a result, and they are hanging out in the overstuffed plane with us and refusing to jump until they are sure their parachutes will work. They also control the vast majority of the political spectrum due to their voting body having been the largest one for decades, so any decision making that doesn't concern them directly in having their lives be as they are, does not matter to them.

Ask a Boomer about providing affordable housing, or daycare, or any other social program they don't ACTIVELY use or think they benefit from on the regular....they will 100% tell you that they don't GAF about it, and they feel it should not be even mentioned. Jeezus even talking about raising the minimum wage gets them all hot and bothered and annoyed...THEY didn't need those things, so why should we? Right? Want to know what they DO care about and WILL raise a stink about? Try to raise the (already bargain basement) property taxes on those houses they own that they bought 4 decades ago for peanuts. They will rant and roar about it. My FIL is one such. He lives (on his own, as a 78 year old man) in a 3-story 4-bedroom fully detached house in one of Toronto's most affluent neighbourhoods that he's owned since the early 1980's. When he leaned that Olivia Chow had been elected mayor the other week, he was so angry about it that my wife said "don't talk to him right now, he's angry and he knows you voted for Olivia Chow"...I asked why and it was due to the sole fact that he knew she would raise his property taxes. I told him (eventually when he was not as angry) that EVERY mayoral candidate would HAVE had to raise property taxes...anyone who said they would not was a liar just trying to get elected, Toronto is DEEP as fuck in debt and that's a massive source of revenue they needed...naturally he didn't believe me. But yeah, the only thing that gets a Boomer riled and wanting change to their beloved status quo is if you try to take a little of what they hoard to help the rest of us. They feel that if they worked for those things in a world that at the time rewarded that behaviour, that we should do the same... in a world they don't understand is MUCH changed. They prevent SO much good from happening by greedily clutching their treasure in old castles they paid nothing for. If you could go back in time and tell the free love/no war/anti-govt group of hippies that one day they would shut themselves up inside fortifications and then stonewall any and all progress because the world THEY FUCKING CREATED scares them in their old age? They would likely have called you a bootlicker. What a change a few decades makes.

So what does all this mean? People toss around eat the rich, and the French revolution, and things like this....but honestly just making the wealth hoarders pay a fair share in taxes, and punishing those that break those rules with jail time and not fines, or hell even just holding CEO's salaries to like 10-30% of their lowest page workers so they stay as just "well off" people VS billionaires with enough money individually to SOLVE HOMELESSNESS (for example) would be enough to foment change. But the rich have their hands in the control pie, the government. Until we remove money from politics I don't see that happening sadly.

But is the social contract breaking? If 50 people socially organize to ransack a Nordstrom en masse....what is the line between "looking the other way when a parent steals food or formula" and "people eating the rich by taking the rich and selling it so they can afford to live" Are they robin hoods? Of course not, they are still criminals...but the boldness in such numbers smacks of the bigger issue which is that the disparity between the super wealthy and those just trying to get by each month or pay for their kids to be looked after is way wider than anyone is willing to admit. If these things are happening at this level, how far off is further social unrest en masse? At the biggest Weston grocery store in the city they just put up a bunch of security gates everywhere and are checking receipts now...and you have to wonder "If the average Joe is angry enough at people like Galen Weston for wealth hoarding while we struggle that they are worried and putting up security gates/checking receipts to prevent theft at self-checkouts...that not just a policy to prevent petty theft (something they've never bothered about before)....that means they absolutely KNOW that the social contract is seemingly breaking and average people are fed up enough that a bunch of gates had to be placed to prevent it...that's insane to me.

Anyone have anything else to add or want to discuss? I thought it would just be good to have a discussion type thread where these convos can be had about this stuff. Is the social contract slowly breaking? Is the wealth disparity coupled with climate change and other factors pushing everyone to a breaking point?

I've never felt as bereft and depressed living in this country as I do now, and seeing things like the Greenbelt being sold off in plain sight with no one to stop them from doing it, just the most recent in a LONG line of govt scandals that prove no one really has our best interests at heart and everyone can clearly be bought by the highest bidder. I'm bit lost and I wonder if anyone else feels like that. I don't know how we fix any of this. It feels like every industry out there is seeking record high profits every quarter and greedily fleecing everyone every chance they get, there is no shame anymore, no hiding it, and just putting up prices because they can...and when we can actually GET people engaged enough to vote in decent numbers, we STILL can't outvote the Boomers so we stay here...treading water as the tides keeps rising...

Required watching on such a subject: Kurosawa's 1963 film HIGH & LOW ~ "I don’t know. I’m not interested in self-analysis. I do know my room was so cold in winter and so hot in summer I couldn’t sleep. Your house looked like heaven, high up there. That’s how I began to hate you.”

[polishgenius]

Yes, but I feel it should be clarified that the wealth-hoarding, poor-opressing rich and corporate classes are breaking that social contract just as much and just as violently as rioters and looters... and first.


When the people in control use wider society's adherence to said contract to avoid protest against them abusing it, something's gonna give. Is looting a single store the right way to go about it? Probably not, but... I can't bring myself to be mad about it.

And the thing is in a lot of nations we've gotten so used to non-violent protest (or even slightly violent protest) being a non-factor that the politicians and rich have been moving with impunity. The French get it.

[Chance]

While I do think there is much fundamentally wrong with our western society, it is still the best society people have come up with and yes it may be go abit awry currently. Personally I think a global initative to tax corporations and reduce tax on working people would be a good thing and completely unfeasable. Most crucial infrastructure should also never have been sold to or built by private initatives, who the hell wants a privately electrical net which maximizes profit over function. It certainly fucked over europe during the start of the Ukraine crisis. So while I think goverment should be more actively involved in crucial parts of industry, banking, retail and transportations I'm also gradually becoming suspicious of big goverment as I'm seeing a goverment over here both in the EU and Sweden who basically is less able to conduct its core functions while engaging in what is basically nice to have but not necessary. I'd rather have well funded schools, healthcare, pensions and security than ideological and/or prestige driven projects.

Housing bubbles burst, in sweden we had one burst in the 90's it destroyed a lot of peoples life savings. But really it did not have much of an long term effect it simply depressed prices for a decade and when confidence was recovered and interest rates plummeted in the 2000's, since prices have skyrocketed making anyone who owned property before about 2015 very happy. Anyone who bought after 2015 however are litterarly fucked if anything bad happens and pay perhaps 50% of income in interest, loans and housing costs unless they are basically rich.

Still it isn't as apocalyptic as one might imagine unless interest rates rise above what you can pay there is basically only the risk of having to wait 5-10 years to sell.

Looking at the people I know there are a lot of people who succede and have what they expected/their parents had but the key factors are stable couple with two good incomes and a lot of hard work. Its simply how society is designed over here and it fucks over everyone else who simply have to lower their expectations.

This post has been edited by Chance: 14 August 2023 - 08:33 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

It's worth remembering that anecdotes are not data, crime has been around for a long time, and these 'flash mob' crimes may have more to do with being enabled by the internet (not sure exactly how they're organized---via encrypted services like Telegram?) than anything else.

During the first year of the pandemic crime (or reported 'crime' by US legal standards) was actually down significantly in LA; in the second year it was still lower than in 2019, which was slightly lower than in 2015. In the US as a whole crime did go up by about 29% in 2020, and about an additional 6% in 2021.

However, it's still much lower than it was in the early to mid 1990's.

U.S. Crime Rate & Statistics 1990-2023 | MacroTrends

In U.S. cities,

Quote

Robberies, residential burglaries, nonresidential burglaries, and larcenies all decreased in the first half of 2023 compared to the first half of 2022.

Crime Trends in U.S. Cities: Mid-Year 2023 Update - Council on Criminal Justice (counciloncj.org)

Most of the increase in shoplifting can apparently be largely attributed to organized crime being able to sell stolen goods via the internet rather than people stealing for personal use. So while

Quote

"There is a trend of people who may have never stolen before, they are unsophisticated in how they steal. They're taking necessities like bread and meat. We are seeing some of that," he said.

The bigger bucket, however, is crime of opportunity. "This is organized retail crime. It's an opportunistic crew stealing specific items from a specific place or one item from many places to resell them," said Hayes. The stolen goods are most often sold online or to neighborhood mom and pop shops or at street fairs

Why retail theft is soaring: inflation, the economy -- and opportunity | CNN Business

There will probably be a mass exodus to Canada in the not very distant future as a consequence of global warming---at least if the wildfires aren't bad enough to keep people away (there must be some places in Canada that would be minimally affected?). If there is, property values will go up (though Canada is a huge country...).

But these are still good questions to ask.

Interesting article re: the social contract and Western democracies:

Quote

Some half a million Israelis have protested, which is the equivalent of approximately 17 million Americans. It is powerful: It has shut down an airport, highways, schools, businesses. It is broad: The country's doctors, as well as 150 of its largest companies, have gone on strike. Lawyers, scientists, teachers, students, entrepreneurs, and agricultural workers have joined the protests; the Histadrut, Israel's national trade union representing more than 700,000 workers, has been pressured to call a general strike. Tech firms have threatened to leave the country. [...] Shockingly, thousands of reservists, including pilots and members of the elite fighting units, have threatened to withhold their service. Former leaders of the Shin Bet and the Mossad have spoken out strongly in support of the protests and condemned what the opposition refers to as a coup.

And the movement is unflagging; it has organized weekly demonstrations, many enormous, for more than seven months. All of this activity dwarfs anything we saw in the United States during the Donald Trump years, despite the anti-Trump forces' self-flattering description of themselves as "the Resistance" and the now-dashed hope that Black Lives Matter could create a sustainable, genuinely mass movement. [...]

Israel is a very different place from the United States (or Western Europe). And the differences, not the similarities, are the key to the Israeli movement's strength—and to what we can learn from it.

[...]

In the United States, we focus, sometimes obsessively, on rights. Rights are undeniably crucial. But they aren't everything. We Americans pay far less attention to the concept of responsibility: of democracy as a dialectic among government, civil society, and citizens. When I ask my students—smart, empathetic, caring young people—what they feel they owe our country, they usually come up blank. But in Israel, [...] "The social contract is very demanding. There is no tradition of the rugged individual, of American libertarianism; that's really foreign to us. This is a society that was created with a sense of the collective: The state is supposed to provide a lot, and we're supposed to provide a lot. The government is violating that"—hence the widespread feeling of anger and betrayal.

[...] the elite in Israel is different from ours: Silicon Valley software engineers and leftist academics rarely fight in America's wars. In contrast, as Halevi pointed out, Israel's "elites are not only 'privileged' but sacrificial."

Israel's Democracy Movement Has Something Important to Teach Us (The Atlantic - msn.com)

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Chance, on 14 August 2023 - 08:30 PM, said:

While I do think there is much fundamentally wrong with our western society, it is still the best society people have come up with and yes it may be go abit awry currently. Personally I think a global initative to tax corporations and reduce tax on working people would be a good thing and completely unfeasable. Most crucial infrastructure should also never have been sold to or built by private initatives, who the hell wants a privately electrical net which maximizes profit over function. It certainly fucked over europe during the start of the Ukraine crisis. So while I think goverment should be more actively involved in crucial parts of industry, banking, retail and transportations I'm also gradually becoming suspicious of big goverment as I'm seeing a goverment over here both in the EU and Sweden who basically is less able to conduct its core functions while engaging in what is basically nice to have but not necessary. I'd rather have well funded schools, healthcare, pensions and security than ideological and/or prestige driven projects.

Housing bubbles burst, in sweden we had one burst in the 90's it destroyed a lot of peoples life savings. But really it did not have much of an long term effect it simply depressed prices for a decade and when confidence was recovered and interest rates plummeted in the 2000's, since prices have skyrocketed making anyone who owned property before about 2015 very happy. Anyone who bought after 2015 however are litterarly fucked if anything bad happens and pay perhaps 50% of income in interest, loans and housing costs unless they are basically rich.

Still it isn't as apocalyptic as one might imagine unless interest rates rise above what you can pay there is basically only the risk of having to wait 5-10 years to sell.

Looking at the people I know there are a lot of people who succede and have what they expected/their parents had but the key factors are stable couple with two good incomes and a lot of hard work. Its simply how society is designed over here and it fucks over everyone else who simply have to lower their expectations.

[Macros]

I do get very bleak at times when I look at the world.
Corruption and greed makes abercrombies world look like a fairy tale, a Disney one not the brothers grim.

Then there's where I live, our government has not sat for the guts of FIVE fuking years and the same wankers got voted back in to not do their Jo's a few months ago.


So whats the fucking point


Putin invades Russia, nato drags it's heels when it could end that shit in a month, but it doesnt

So whats the fucking point

Rees Mogg can get enough votes
Trump is not in prison
BP record profits
The world is on fire and the tories back pedal on fossil fuel restrictions
The Saudis bomb Yemen into the stone age but pay footballers money so it's all good
Russian mercs are active in multiple countries and have been for years and no one cares
Big food are actively killing us and know it and don't care
Pesticide will have made 40% of the world's arable land dead fairly soon
The oceans are fucked
Microplastic
Pension pot failures

Burn it all down
We don't deserve this planet

When does evil flourish?
When 'good people' do nothing

[Nicodimas]

This is a long collapse , America is really close to civil war..the left does not see it though...for years during the Obama administration the flyover states got ignored . Now they see shelled out democratic inner cities too..not much good has come from this...

http://theeconomicco...-like-wildfire/

Another instance is the left largely ignoring the child sex trafficking problem. You can now be accused of being racist and a pedophobe from many...just more ways from the left to hate. Never thought I'd see that ..however lots would hit the powerful dems and gotta insulate the powerful.

However most leftist fingers in their ears not listening at this point. Been that way so long ..you can literally point at the rot and where it stems from..

When the revolts get kicked off ..they will be like their was no warning signs ! They estimate the group organizing is 30 million strong.


https://alt-market.u...rs-during-covid

The right should have stood up to how far they have gone it would have mitigated it,too many cowards.. but here we are society meltdown. It's live outside ...

However it's still gonna get a lot worse before better. See how much they can ignore and kick that can on society.

Or maybe all this is on purpose.

[Chance]

Azath Vitr (D, on 14 August 2023 - 09:49 PM, said:

That aztec is a hundred percent right, no one is likely to see a better system during their lifetime than the one they where born into unless some very radical and probably scary changes happen. Historically such changes have nearly always been for the worst in the short term and only over longer timespans benefitted the masses. Democracy is going on a few centuries in the west and its inevitable rise as the only/best model for a society is currently looking shakier than it has since the fall of the Berlin wall. As I have quite a bit off stuff and investment in the current world order I prefere it to remain recognizable for another 50-60 years at least.

Personally I think we could build better societies but those societies would not be identical depending on who you tailored it to and as such one man's utopia is another man's nightmare. The best that can be accomplished is something that allow a large percentage to be reasonably satisfied. Scandinavian countries and a few others seems to do this fairly well for all our complaining and most days Canada would be on that list too even if it is more of a guess and impression since I haven't lived over there.

To trully fix the world requires what Ian Banks called an Outside Context Problem of epic proportions.

This post has been edited by Chance: 15 August 2023 - 09:35 PM

[the broken]

So were the conquistadors a step up or down?
Maybe I'm setting the bar too low, but it doesn't seem like we're in for a wide scale societal collapse.

Looking back at, say, the 1910s or 1920s, most of these things have happened before.

Pandemic? Check, but much worse.

War? Check, but much worse

Economic crash? Check, but much worse.

Civil unrest? Check, but much worse.

Most of our societies were able to get through that intact, and that was with starvation a real prospect. The ones that did collapse, like Russia, Germany, or Austria Hungary, had to deal with stressors far beyond anythhing we've got now.

If anything is going to collapse, it will be the likes of Russia, China, or South Africa, who are dealing with so much more than any Western nation at the moment (look at the flood footage alone) But they're not falling.

[Chance]

the broken, on 16 August 2023 - 12:57 PM, said:

So were the conquistadors a step up or down?

I'm pretty sure 99 out of 100 aztecs would vote for the conquistadors to go back home so would their decendants a generation after the conquest. The horror stories of the conquest and subsequent enslavement of most of the people are well I'm looking for something stronger but have to go with impressively gruesome.

This post has been edited by Chance: 16 August 2023 - 02:32 PM

[Macros]

not to mention the devastation the fancy diseases that followed to the native population

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Macros, on 16 August 2023 - 03:16 PM, said:

not to mention the devastation the fancy diseases that followed to the native population

The irony is that we could greatly enhance our ability to understand diseases and prevent future pandemics if we didn't abandon the ancient practice of human sacrifice for the greater good. From a rational and utilitarian perspective, it would be a net positive to bring back human sacrifice---not to false gods (or guns, or pollution, or money), but to science; at the very least those slated to be executed anyway (while they may be extreme outliers in certain respects, in many cases that won't be relevant, or can be adequately controlled for).

Of course, the 'social fabric'---the veil concealing the genuine brutality and absurdity of human existence, the indoctrination into irrational dogmatic delusions about made-up 'natural laws' and 'rights' and the 'sanctity of life'---still holds too much of humanity too firmly in its miasmic clutches to allow many people to be rational about it.

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 18 August 2023 - 02:38 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Though if the Aztecs had been truly devoted to sacrifice for the greater good, they could in theory have stopped the spread of disease if all who had come into contact with the Spaniards, and all who came into contact with those who had come into contact with them, had sacrificed themselves (or the priests could have sacrificed them and then committed suicide, etc.). So from that perspective the Aztecs fell because they didn't perform enough human sacrifices.

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 18 August 2023 - 02:47 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Azath Vitr (D, on 18 August 2023 - 02:31 PM, said:

Macros, on 16 August 2023 - 03:16 PM, said:

not to mention the devastation the fancy diseases that followed to the native population

The irony is that we could greatly enhance our ability to understand diseases and prevent future pandemics if we didn't abandon the ancient practice of human sacrifice for the greater good. From a rational and utilitarian perspective, it would be a net positive to bring back human sacrifice---not to false gods (or guns, or pollution, or money), but to science; at the very least those slated to be executed anyway (while they may be extreme outliers in certain respects, in many cases that won't be relevant, or can be adequately controlled for).

Of course, the 'social fabric'---the veil concealing the genuine brutality and absurdity of human existence, the indoctrination into irrational dogmatic delusions about made-up 'natural laws' and 'rights' and the 'sanctity of life'---still holds too much of humanity too firmly in its miasmic clutches to allow many people to be rational about it.

Granted, if we believe that the 'social contract' is really much of a thing, one could argue that it's rational for individuals put their 'self-interest' above all else, and that the individual's continued life is the preeminent rational imperative for that individual. So a rational individual would only agree to the social contract on condition that they not be sacrificed, even if it would save the lives of everyone else on Earth; the ban on human sacrifice for science then becomes analogous to the tragedy of the commons.

But, continuing in this 'rationalist' vein, even if citizens of one society did opt in to such a contract, in a world where power is vastly unequal between societies, it would make rational sense for them to subjugate and sacrifice members of other societies whose uncoerced cooperation is of greater utility cost than their continued subjugation. Advocates of 'social contract' theory generally do not view that as a desirable outcome iirc. Of course in reality it's almost entirely an ex post facto rationalization of what we've been brainwashed to believe and not rationally question.

Aside from immigration (when undertaken not under duress), the strongest case for the 'social contract' having much in the way of empirical reality is probably democracy: but that form of social contract is still not founded on individual consent; and most of the 'rights' designed to protect the individual from the tyranny of the majority in the United States were decided not by a majority but by white male property owners several hundred years ago, or by Supreme Court justices more recently (with some major exceptions like the Civil Rights Act).

Realistically no immigrant is going to have anywhere near a complete understanding of the laws to which they're consenting. And immigrants to the United States consent to allow human sacrifice to Justice in the form of capital punishment; but executing people without first giving them over to science and then salvaging as much of their organs as humanly possible is just a waste of good human.

(Of course, if this line of reasoning seems unfathomably horrific to you, as it probably does, take solace in the fact that there's almost certainly no chance of it being enacted in the foreseeable future (at least outside of authoritarian countries)---unless conditions in the Pandemecine become far more immediately dire....)

[Nicodimas]

This song conveys so much of the strife America is going through ...


https://youtu.be/sqS...ZfPOgzq1OB34qAi

(Many are just suffering under the current administration, since Obama 1+)

[Tsundoku]

Uh, maybe Nico, but the current state of the world and especially the instability can pretty much be laid at the door of one DJT aka "Putin's Bitch". Or "Doormat", if we're going with things laid at doors.

The social contract has been bending since the 80s with Reaganomics emboldening the rich such that they're no longer even pretending to give a shit about the poors. The wealth of the world is being hoovered upward, and the govts of the world are too indebted to the rich to do anything about it.

I'm not against someone making a profit, but it should be a fair one, not the ghastly profiteering we've been watching snowball over the last few decades and especially the most recent years.

[Gorefest]

The guy has a Homelander avatar. Cannot be more obvious. Just don't feed the troll, is my advice. He just loves shit-stirring.

This post has been edited by Gorefest: 18 August 2023 - 10:36 PM

[Mezla PigDog]

Tsundoku, on 18 August 2023 - 10:32 PM, said:

The social contract has been bending since the 80s with Reaganomics emboldening the rich such that they're no longer even pretending to give a shit about the poors. The wealth of the world is being hoovered upward, and the govts of the world are too indebted to the rich to do anything about it.

This. And with the owners of most of the mass media being in the same super rich cohort. Factor in social media removing all editorial standards of even a pretence at basic reporting standards. Then throw manipulating bot campaigns.

I think the world has always been fucked but while it was only paper based reporting we didn't hear about it and since 24hour news and then phone addiction it's been a race to the bottom to tell us the worst stuff from anywhere.

Is wealth disparity any worse than medieval times when the majority of the population were serfs? I dunno.

Anyway, Nico's first post got me musing on why the QAnon types are so obsessed with the left being into paedophilia. Is it simply the easiest topic to universally agree on as bad, no nuance or shades of grey. So slap that association to the political group you don't like and morons will flock to it?

[Macros]

Kind of.
It ties back to good old anti semitism from a story made up in medieval England by a priest trying to sell a martyrdom that some child who died had been chopped up and eaten by the Jews (really)
That's where the term bloodsomethingorother (not digging it up) came from. Qanon global elite and the powerful left it a dog whistle for rich Jews, pizza gate started as a joke on 4chan, then the retards grabbed it and lo, we have the"global elite" raping and murderer ing kids

[Macros]

A book for Nico