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Author Topic: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?  (Read 3876 times)

Eirikrautha

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Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
« Reply #15 on: January 06, 2022, 06:54:34 AM »
I dropped Ellis a long time ago as her agenda creeped more and more into her vids and everything else.

Id say Good riddance. Enjoy being eaten by your own. You deserve it.

But we all know shes too popular to go down and she will somehow dodge the bullet like others of this cult have.

I don't know.  The same mob that says, "I like her" one day can often be the one that howls for her to be thrown to the lions the next.  People, as a species, don't change...

soundchaser

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Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
« Reply #16 on: January 06, 2022, 11:07:50 AM »
Helpful resource for the discussion:

Julian Simon’s book, The State of Humanity (backstory on how it came about is also handy)

Also seek Rosling’s TED talks.

Being a growth economist, I can reference for folks over 250 research articles on doom and growth. But, it might work best to just dive into Romer’s work.


Kyle Aaron

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Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
« Reply #17 on: January 06, 2022, 06:29:57 PM »
TED talks are aimed at a Western middle class audience, and work very hard at telling them what they want to hear. "Go ahead and keep consuming, at most you might just have to make some little changes about what you consume, more tofu or something."

And of course, their "talk" is not a conversation, but a lecture. In a conversation, someone might ask awkward questions or contradict you. They might bring up Jeavon's Paradox, for example, or note that ours is hardly the first civilisation to claim it'll last forever. "Yeah but this time we're right..."

TED talks will no more tolerate someone to doubt the doctrines of Progress! and Science! than Catholic church-goers would tolerate the priest standing up to doubt the doctrine of transubstantiation. That's now what they've gone to the service for.

But they will go to a service where they're told that those other bastards in that other church are wrong and stupid. And all this is what produces the Woke movement, which is just our society's version of Louis' Versailles court manners and ritual: a way to separate the elites from the commoners, and for the elites to fight for a larger slice of a shrinking pie.
« Last Edit: January 06, 2022, 06:32:50 PM by Kyle Aaron »
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Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
« Reply #18 on: January 06, 2022, 06:45:21 PM »

Also seek Rosling’s TED talks.

Rosling is excellent. There are widespread assumptions about the state of the world and where it's heading that are simply wrong, and he dispels them in an entertaining and accessible way. Particularly relevant is the world's population growing out of control (nope, all evidence suggests it's going to peak at about 10 billion), and the first vs. third world disparity (the stark divide has mostly been erased, with most countries falling into the middle income range).

Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
« Reply #19 on: January 06, 2022, 06:51:44 PM »
TED talks are aimed at a Western middle class audience, and work very hard at telling them what they want to hear. "Go ahead and keep consuming, at most you might just have to make some little changes about what you consume, more tofu or something."
While I ultimately agree that resources are limited, I disagree with the idea that the pie has begun to shrink (currently). I see it more as humans not being able to manage certain states psychological and physical being and become immensly wasteful with said pie.

Without immigration, the population in 1st world countries is largely shrinking due to lacking a desire to propagate. Id say thats pretty radically different from the past times.

oggsmash

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Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
« Reply #20 on: January 06, 2022, 10:54:19 PM »
I suspect like most situations like it before it in history, it will take a collapse and rebuilding to "fix".  I think it can limp along dying for a very long time though.
The authour John Michael Greer talks about this a lot. The collapse of a civilisation is something which takes centuries. It's not overnight, and it's not linear. It's a process where there's a drop in level of complexity and reach, a plateau for a while with lots of talk of rebuilding and maybe even a small amount of growth - but never to the previous level - and then another drop, and so on.

The collapse takes place because of resources and systems. A potential empire is a country which has X% of the world's population, but more than X% of the world's resources. It uses those resources to make a better lifestyle for its populace. Humans being what they are, the imperial citizens demand even more, and of course the neighbours want some, too, and so the empire devotes some of its resources to expanding and getting even more resources.

Of course, the use of the military to acquire more resources and defend the resources the empire already has, has a point of diminishing returns. With the effective return on their military investment declining, the elites may get panicky and start hoarding. This causes internal tumult as the citizens demand more. To manage the distribution of resources, and all the military, the empire puts in place systems. The citizens now see these systems as another way to distribute the resources. "If I can't improve my life by farming," (for example) "I can do it by becoming a Farm Inspector."

Now, some systems add value, and these will be put in place fairly quickly. Roads and road-mending, for example. But as the obviously-useful systems have all been put into place, people will start putting in systems with diminishing returns. It's exactly as it is with the military.

So again: an empire is a country which has X% of the world's population, but much more than X% of its resources, and wants even more. Over time they develop a military also in excess of X%, and bureaucratic systems to handle it all. And both the military and systems eventually have diminishing returns - and in the end, negative returns. Spending more resources on them makes the empire worse off.

When the pie is getting bigger, anyone who wants a bigger slice can get one. When the pie is getting smaller, the only way to get a bigger slice is to take it off someone else. Indeed, even to keep the same sized slice might require taking it off someone else. And so in a declining empire we see more and more internal conflicts.

As I said, this process takes time. A person can be happily walking around in the capital of a great empire, and then in 50-75 years' time their grandchildren can be in that same empire which is now rather diminished, its streets no longer as clean and its palaces less numerous, and their grandchildren are using the old palace stones to build sheep fences, and only know old tales of glory by word of mouth.

We sometimes think of the "six degrees of separation" thing, about how I know someone who knows someone who - and thus indirectly know everyone on the planet by just a few steps. We rarely think of it vertically, through history. Think of Queen Elizabeth II. Her first Prime Minister as Queen was Winston Churchill. When he was first elected to parliament, Queen Victoria was on the throne. And Victoria was born in 1818.  By just two degrees of separation, Elizabeth II knows someone born in 1818.

Now if the Scots and Irish have their way, there may in the next few years no longer be a United Kingdom. And so with just a couple of degrees of separation in history, we see Britain going from being the largest empire on the globe, to - perhaps - no longer even having a united homeland. A fall in living standards will of course inevitably follow this, and there will be internal tumult as people fight over what's left. One of the good things about democracy is that it gives people a way to fight over resources and power without the legions marching.

Twitter fights are the modern day version of the old church doctrinal disputes. They pretend it's over philosophy of living, but really it's just a status shuffle, a fight over a diminishing pool of resources. The longer they're doing that, the more we put off actual fighting. Long may it continue.

But this is what's happening.

   Agreed...I wonder though, is advancing technology and communication going to make the toppling of western society faster (maybe much faster than empires fell in the past) or be able to be used to greatly slow it?  I think there is a reason powers that be do all they can to control mass communication at all points possible.   I think those powers that be need to get the internet under control, or it may foment a faster fall than expected.  I could see a "utopia" form up where people do get what they get and just accept it.  Humans are very adapatable, prisons in the USA operate with relative order most of the time even in prisons that have some of the most violent anti social people imaginable, and alot of it has to do with settling to a routine. 

S'mon

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Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
« Reply #21 on: January 10, 2022, 04:38:05 AM »
Lindsay Ellis - one of the last things she did before quitting was a Cancel attack on the lovely Jill Bearup, who I thoroughly recommend - https://www.youtube.com/c/JillBearup
Ellis was angry that Tom Scott had made a video with Bearup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwuwgJR2Qg8 when Bearup had apparently once said something non-approved by SJW narrative.
Ellis is vile and has suffered poetic justice.

Kyle Aaron

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Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
« Reply #22 on: January 10, 2022, 05:06:17 AM »
I wonder though, is advancing technology and communication going to make the toppling of western society faster (maybe much faster than empires fell in the past) or be able to be used to greatly slow it?  I think there is a reason powers that be do all they can to control mass communication at all points possible.
They do try to control it, yes. But the middle ages had their peasant's rebellions, after all, so it's not clear it makes much difference. I think the communication speeds the propagation of all ideas, both those likely to change society, and those likely to keep it the same, so it comes to much the same thing in the end.

What has changed and is a bit unusual historically is the demographics of society - low birth rate, lots of older people. That makes a country more peaceful, which is part of why places like Sierra Leone get more revolutions than places like Sweden. You get old and fat and content, rather than young and slim and hungry. Yet another reason armies recruit young blokes, as you know.

Recently Australia has been buying up a bunch of expensive defence materiel, and my argument is that if we're purely defensive, we don't need it - after all, a bunch of illiterate goatherds with AKs and IEDs kicked us out of their shitholes. But they had something else: a willingness to die in large numbers. I would argue that if we don't have that, then no amount of fancy gear will save us, after all look at Kuwait falling to Iraq.

Old fat content people tend not to be willing to die in large numbers, thus our lockdowns vs covid, etc. This means that long-term, our countries will fall to cultures with more younger people. And centuries from now it'll be like Romano-Britain becoming Saxon Britain, people will argue how much we were invaded and how much we just invited the people here. I mean, one day the Indians in Dubai will be tired of being enslaved by the Arabs and rise up and demand a parliament, or something. Badly-handled migration will see the same thing across the West.
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GeekyBugle

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Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
« Reply #23 on: February 03, 2022, 12:22:54 PM »
To Kyle mostly:

The pie has been getting bigger tho. Everywhere where capitalism is allowed to prosper we see a reduction in poverty.

But lets see it in a world scale:

For most of human history the natural state of man was poverty, 1916 we get the first ever billionaire (Rockefeller), now we have 2,755 as off 2021 (Forbes) with 493 newly minted ones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires

And yet the world wide poverty has been in decline, https://www.vox.com/2014/12/14/7384515/extreme-poverty-decline

When even a far left outlet like vox admits poverty is in decline while at the same time wealth is increasing you need to come to the only logical conclusion that wealth isn't stolen but created.

As for resources, yes those are finite and mining asteroids/other planets is just a pipe dream. BUT, as pointed, we are pretty good at working around stuff. GMOs now allow for a greater yield per square mile, IF we manage to wrestle control from the eco-terrorists you'll soon see many other problems solved, like clean energy (Nuclear) Getting CO2 from the atmosphere, bio reactors for blue-green algae and drop it in the sea which in turn boosts the thropic chain yielding more fish.

We need less Sci-Fi kickstarters and more scientific research.
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