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The Lounge => Media and Inspiration => Topic started by: Ratman_tf on January 02, 2022, 04:55:25 PM

Title: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Ratman_tf on January 02, 2022, 04:55:25 PM
https://www.newsweek.com/lindsay-ellis-omelas-meaning-vlogger-quits-youtube-raya-controversy-1663563

Popular progressive youtube blogger and critic leaves the interwebs over harassment.

I won't sum up the story here, the details are all over the internet. A search for "Linday Ellis harassment" will keep you occupied for hours.

My mean spirited reaction has been along the lines of "Bed, Made, Lie", but my serious reaction is that this is social justice activism boiled down to it's essence.
All the progressive, anti-racism, equity, blah blah blah are tools for people to set up their own heirarchy and thrash each other over dominance of that hierarchy.
Lindsay particiapted and is shocked, shocked! that she got put in the crosshairs.
And as a cherry on the shit sundae, her flounce letter on patreon still desperatley clings to progressive talking points, showing that she hasn't learned a thing, and is only pissed that she was the target.


Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Pat on January 02, 2022, 05:03:53 PM
Quick summary: "My life ended nine months ago", but I still have this huge YouTube and Patreon following and have tons of money so even though I'm not going to do anything new I'm going to keep them open so I can still rake in the cash oh woe is me.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Shrieking Banshee on January 02, 2022, 05:13:23 PM
She is not worth much in-depth discussion. And she doesn't earn my pity because as agreed this is a 'Lie in Bed' sort of deal.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Ratman_tf on January 02, 2022, 06:18:46 PM
She is not worth much in-depth discussion.

I mostly agree, but I also think that for some people out there, this might be their moment of realization that social justice activism isn't all it's cracked up to be. And so I have some patience in rehashing topics, on the off chance that one of those souls wanders into our neck of the woods.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Pat on January 02, 2022, 11:25:23 PM
She is not worth much in-depth discussion.

I mostly agree, but I also think that for some people out there, this might be their moment of realization that social justice activism isn't all it's cracked up to be. And so I have some patience in rehashing topics, on the off chance that one of those souls wanders into our neck of the woods.
It certainly isn't Lindsay Ellis' moment of realization. She's criticizing them for the same tactics she used, without seeming to have any awareness of the staggering level of hypocrisy she's displaying. It's bad because it happened to her and she hates being picked on, that's all. If she was forgiven, she'd be wielding a pitchfork and burning people at the stake, tomorrow.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Kyle Aaron on January 03, 2022, 02:38:43 AM
this is social justice activism boiled down to it's essence.
All the progressive, anti-racism, equity, blah blah blah are tools for people to set up their own heirarchy and thrash each other over dominance of that hierarchy.
In Australia, in the year 2000 some 16% of adults had a tertiary degree. By 2020 this was 42%. Finding jobs for them all is hard.

Now, this can be dealt with a bit by credential inflation - I once knew a woman who'd left school early and got work as a bank teller in 1988, the following year they offered to put her on a "fast track to management" programme which she turned down - and by 1994 when she was at uni studying science and applied to do casual bank teller work, she was rejected because by this stage they wanted someone with a Bachelor of Commerce.

This is ordinary market forces at work. If you get 100 resumes for a bank teller job and 50 of them have degrees and 50 don't, the first thing you'll do is bin the 50 without degrees - even if you yourself reached your position without a degree - had she taken the fast track, she would have been the one demanding a Bachelor of Commerce when she herself didn't even have year 12. Credential inflation.

Credential inflation will help deal with some of the excess university-educated. But people have rational reasons for valuing degrees less. We do have 3-4 times as many people with degrees compared to a generation before, but we don't have 3-4 times as many really smart people. In fact, the other day I read of a young woman with Down's Syndrome graduating from university here in Australia. Granted, it was just a drama degree, and it did take her ten years. And full credit to that young woman for her hard work - but speaking bluntly, if a retarded person can get a degree, then a degree doesn't mean much.

Extending this, standards at universities have obviously dropped, and there's been an expansion in degrees which, standards or not, don't mean much.

Now, everyone desires social mobility. They'd like to be a bit richer and more well-respected. Whether they're willing to do the work required and sacrifice in other areas (such as family) is another matter, but we'd all like to boost our Social stat if we can. Now, if we're really well-connected then those connections will do it for us. This is how people like old Drumpf and Dubya got ahead - their dads introduced them to the right people. This goes all the way down, if the local selective school doesn't have any places left and Junior was 0.1 GPA off getting in but his mum is in the bridge club with the principal - well, Junior gets in.

But what if you're not well-connected? Then you have to be smart. But again, not everyone is that smart. How then to get ahead? Well... create job vacancies. You can make up a bullshit job like Diversity Manager, and you can undermine those above you. It's like the army - if the General dies, then some Colonel is promoted to fill his position, and some Lt Col is promoted to fill his position, and so on down the line. It may even be worth that 2nd Lieutenant arranging for the General to eat a really dodgy curry one night. A few hundred quid to the chef ought to do it.

The modern academic and managerial world is a bit too civilised for outright murder, and so they come up with all this other nonsense instead. This is part of the downslope of any major civilisation - it happened to the Byzantines, the French, the Chinese - as they decayed there were fewer positions, less cake to go around, and court ritual and etiquette became more and more elaborate and those elites more easily-offended.

And just like those other decaying empires, we have a lot of eunuchs. Emperors like eunuchs because lacking a blood family they are loyal only to the emperor and themselves, it makes them easier to control. Thus government encouragement of homosexuality, transgenderism and so on. Sure, they can adopt children, or might do it before exploring their identity, but mostly they won't reproduce, so they'll be more loyal to the system.

And this system has to become elaborate so that it's easy to do the wrong thing and lose your position, thus creating a job vacancy and social mobility for the others below you. In reality Dumbledore and Kirk would have been knifed repeatedly by some ambitious underling decades before the deaths shown, nobody is going to wait 100 years for a promotion.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: oggsmash on January 03, 2022, 09:23:56 AM
this is social justice activism boiled down to it's essence.
All the progressive, anti-racism, equity, blah blah blah are tools for people to set up their own heirarchy and thrash each other over dominance of that hierarchy.
In Australia, in the year 2000 some 16% of adults had a tertiary degree. By 2020 this was 42%. Finding jobs for them all is hard.

Now, this can be dealt with a bit by credential inflation - I once knew a woman who'd left school early and got work as a bank teller in 1988, the following year they offered to put her on a "fast track to management" programme which she turned down - and by 1994 when she was at uni studying science and applied to do casual bank teller work, she was rejected because by this stage they wanted someone with a Bachelor of Commerce.

This is ordinary market forces at work. If you get 100 resumes for a bank teller job and 50 of them have degrees and 50 don't, the first thing you'll do is bin the 50 without degrees - even if you yourself reached your position without a degree - had she taken the fast track, she would have been the one demanding a Bachelor of Commerce when she herself didn't even have year 12. Credential inflation.

Credential inflation will help deal with some of the excess university-educated. But people have rational reasons for valuing degrees less. We do have 3-4 times as many people with degrees compared to a generation before, but we don't have 3-4 times as many really smart people. In fact, the other day I read of a young woman with Down's Syndrome graduating from university here in Australia. Granted, it was just a drama degree, and it did take her ten years. And full credit to that young woman for her hard work - but speaking bluntly, if a retarded person can get a degree, then a degree doesn't mean much.

Extending this, standards at universities have obviously dropped, and there's been an expansion in degrees which, standards or not, don't mean much.

Now, everyone desires social mobility. They'd like to be a bit richer and more well-respected. Whether they're willing to do the work required and sacrifice in other areas (such as family) is another matter, but we'd all like to boost our Social stat if we can. Now, if we're really well-connected then those connections will do it for us. This is how people like old Drumpf and Dubya got ahead - their dads introduced them to the right people. This goes all the way down, if the local selective school doesn't have any places left and Junior was 0.1 GPA off getting in but his mum is in the bridge club with the principal - well, Junior gets in.

But what if you're not well-connected? Then you have to be smart. But again, not everyone is that smart. How then to get ahead? Well... create job vacancies. You can make up a bullshit job like Diversity Manager, and you can undermine those above you. It's like the army - if the General dies, then some Colonel is promoted to fill his position, and some Lt Col is promoted to fill his position, and so on down the line. It may even be worth that 2nd Lieutenant arranging for the General to eat a really dodgy curry one night. A few hundred quid to the chef ought to do it.

The modern academic and managerial world is a bit too civilised for outright murder, and so they come up with all this other nonsense instead. This is part of the downslope of any major civilisation - it happened to the Byzantines, the French, the Chinese - as they decayed there were fewer positions, less cake to go around, and court ritual and etiquette became more and more elaborate and those elites more easily-offended.

And just like those other decaying empires, we have a lot of eunuchs. Emperors like eunuchs because lacking a blood family they are loyal only to the emperor and themselves, it makes them easier to control. Thus government encouragement of homosexuality, transgenderism and so on. Sure, they can adopt children, or might do it before exploring their identity, but mostly they won't reproduce, so they'll be more loyal to the system.

And this system has to become elaborate so that it's easy to do the wrong thing and lose your position, thus creating a job vacancy and social mobility for the others below you. In reality Dumbledore and Kirk would have been knifed repeatedly by some ambitious underling decades before the deaths shown, nobody is going to wait 100 years for a promotion.

  That IMO is a fantastic summary of the issues of society and moving upward we are facing.   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.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Banjo Destructo on January 04, 2022, 01:22:15 PM
I enjoyed most of her videos, she was entertaining, I could ignore her political beliefs and twitter shitting because I don't use twitter. But in the end she is a toxic garbage person who sometimes produced things that I found entertaining, and she lacked any social grace or manners with which to treat the people she disagrees with, so she deserves none herself unless she makes a legitimate effort of repentance and growth, and she certainly deserves any backlash from the gremlins she associates with because backstabbing and sacrificing heretics is not a bug in their philosophies, its a required feature.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Kyle Aaron on January 04, 2022, 07:39:48 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.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Kyle Aaron on January 04, 2022, 08:16:15 PM
I should add that I've never heard of Ellis before in my life, nor am I interested in delving into it.

What I would suggest is that online fights can be fun, but they don't exactly nourish your soul. What makes your life better is connections with other people, in person where you can. Particularly for the American viewers, Townsends (who focuses on going into the everyday lives of Americans in colonial times) is a great channel, but he offers a nice perspective on this.

Without getting at all political, he just says that getting together in person and making and sharing things is good for you. I don't think he's a tabletop gamer, but I reckon that counts.

Watch this, and I challenge you to have any interest in twitter for a while afterwards.

Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Pat on January 04, 2022, 08:48:42 PM
But this is what's happening.
Except that doesn't describe modern empires. You're talking about expansionistic conquest and exploitation, when the last few centuries have been more about trade and colonies becoming free. You're talking about slices of a diminishing pie, yet since the rise of capitalism the size of the pie has been growing thanks to industrial and technological innovations. We're living in a radically different world than those ancient empires, so any parallels we draw are, at best, suggestive.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Shrieking Banshee on January 04, 2022, 09:03:24 PM
In the modern world its nearly impossible to get more resources with warfare. Because all the most valuable assets are highly fragile and destructible.

Im not saying the bubble couldn't burst and this still somehow ends up playing out, just the comparison to past empires in that way doesn't work.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Kyle Aaron on January 04, 2022, 09:31:51 PM
since the rise of capitalism the size of the pie has been growing thanks to industrial and technological innovations
This is a common misconception. It's simply that the industrial and technological innovations have allowed us to extract more resources. For example, the first practical steam engine burning coal was used to pump water out of the bottom of... coal mines.

Spend five minutes on a websearch looking at the world's consumption of any particular resource you can think of, and you'll find it a fairly steadily rising curve. Now compare with the global rise in GDP over those same several decades - it's a smaller rise. That's called "diminishing returns." And in every case, diminishing returns eventually become negative returns. We need more and more resources just to stay prosperous. The pie is going to get smaller.

Resources have limits. It's a conceit of our particular Western culture with the twin religions of Science! and Progress! that we have surpassed any limits at all. This has about as much objective evidence to support it as the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. "We have surpassed limits" is a statement of faith which is required to participate in modern Western society as a member of anyone above the working class. You have to say that, or at least not contradict it openly. At most you're allowed to say that the Earth has limits but we can all go and live on Mars, or something.

One of the reasons Drumpf won and Clinton lost was that he acknowledged that the US was facing diminishing returns on resource use - that the US had declined. Truman didn't need to talk about "Make America Great Again," because it was at the start of its peak of power and resource access (1945-1990). After that it declined, thus the external flailing (Gulf Wars, etc) and internal flailing (political correctness followed up by wokeness etc). By the time Drumpf came along the US was well and truly declining. Every working class person knew this, but every middle class person had to deny it - because while the working class share of the pie had declined, the middle class share had increased. The guy who acknowledged reality got more votes than the person who denied reality. This won't always be so since voting is voluntary and there's gerrymandering and all that. But still.

Dumpf also falls into another historical pattern. Toynbee wrote about this. One stage is Caesarism. This is why you get a member of the elite who gets himself into power by making himself popular with the plebs, promising to clear out the other elites, who are of course evil, not like him. This Caesar might propel his country to greatness, or the other elites might conspire to bring him down to maintain their position. If the latter, the country faces a period of internal conflict as the elites fight amongst themselves to determine the successor.

I certainly can't think of anyone at all like that in recent US history, can you?
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Pat on January 04, 2022, 10:04:34 PM
since the rise of capitalism the size of the pie has been growing thanks to industrial and technological innovations
This is a common misconception. It's simply that the industrial and technological innovations have allowed us to extract more resources. For example, the first practical steam engine burning coal was used to pump water out of the bottom of... coal mines.

Spend five minutes on a websearch looking at the world's consumption of any particular resource you can think of, and you'll find it a fairly steadily rising curve. Now compare with the global rise in GDP over those same several decades - it's a smaller rise. That's called "diminishing returns." And in every case, diminishing returns eventually become negative returns. We need more and more resources just to stay prosperous. The pie is going to get smaller.

Resources have limits. It's a conceit of our particular Western culture with the twin religions of Science! and Progress! that we have surpassed any limits at all. This has about as much objective evidence to support it as the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. "We have surpassed limits" is a statement of faith which is required to participate in modern Western society as a member of anyone above the working class. You have to say that, or at least not contradict it openly. At most you're allowed to say that the Earth has limits but we can all go and live on Mars, or something.
That's an entirely different argument, and not a very good one. The point I was making is that for most of history, the amount of productive output was fairly constant. It was based primarily on land and the number of people. If those stayed the same, there was little change from year to year, or from generation to generation. With the advent of capitalism and modern science, that changed. Economies actually grew, year after year. The average poor person in the US has more wealt, by nearly any measure other than things like servants and Stradivariuses, than the kings of old.

That's just one of the radical differences between your empires of yore and today. Those empires had to sustain growth by conquest and expropiation. Today, it's based on technological innovation and business practices. Not comparable.

Your doom and gloom argument about finite resources is a new day's version of the same prognostications made by doomsayers of years, decades, and even centuries past. Malthus predicted doom from overpopulation. Hubbert predicted doom from peak oil. They never happened. We had the Green Revolution, and fracking and tar sands. When we run into a limit, like perhaps the final years of Moore's law, decades after it was first predicted to flatten, we have alternatives on the horizon, like quantum computers.

Resources are finite. But humans are remarkably adept at working around those limits. We may some day run into an insuperable barrier, but given the desolate track record of past Cassandras, it's a safe bet the actual restriction won't be one we foresee.

One of the reasons Drumpf won and Clinton lost was that he acknowledged that the US was facing diminishing returns on resource use - that the US had declined. Truman didn't need to talk about "Make America Great Again," because it was at the start of its peak of power and resource access (1945-1990). After that it declined, thus the external flailing (Gulf Wars, etc) and internal flailing (political correctness followed up by wokeness etc). By the time Drumpf came along the US was well and truly declining. Every working class person knew this, but every middle class person had to deny it - because while the working class share of the pie had declined, the middle class share had increased. The guy who acknowledged reality got more votes than the person who denied reality. This won't always be so since voting is voluntary and there's gerrymandering and all that. But still.

Dumpf also falls into another historical pattern. Toynbee wrote about this. One stage is Caesarism. This is why you get a member of the elite who gets himself into power by making himself popular with the plebs, promising to clear out the other elites, who are of course evil, not like him. This Caesar might propel his country to greatness, or the other elites might conspire to bring him down to maintain their position. If the latter, the country faces a period of internal conflict as the elites fight amongst themselves to determine the successor.

I certainly can't think of anyone at all like that in recent US history, can you?
Populists aren't anything new, and there's a 3 letter acronym for people who make everything about a certain ex-carrot.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Omega on January 05, 2022, 11:11:26 PM
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.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Eirikrautha 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...
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: soundchaser 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.

Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Kyle Aaron 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.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Pat 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).
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Shrieking Banshee 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.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: oggsmash 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. 
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: S'mon 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.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: Kyle Aaron 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.
Title: Re: Shall we discuss Lindsay Ellis?
Post by: GeekyBugle 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 (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 (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.