| ▲ | babypuncher 7 hours ago | |
The bottom is just so much farther down than we remember. Tremendous progress was made in the 20th century, particularly in the aftermath of WWII, and we've kind of just been coasting on it for 50 years. Accelerationism was always a terrible idea. | ||
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |
The premise of accelerationism isn't to destroy the world, it's to escape a local maxima. You have some medium-okay but clearly sub-optimal status quo and then a bunch of defenders resisting all change because "things are fine" even though they should be better than fine, or institutions that have been captured by corrupt interests but that situation is stable as long as they continue to provide bread and circuses. If it stays mediocre then everyone muddles along; if it gets worse then people stop ignoring the issue and actually address it so that it gets better. The problem is, it's not just bread and circuses. People have been divided into camps for the purpose of directing their dissatisfaction against each other instead of the entities responsible. So people get mad when things go wrong but the perpetrators convince them that the enemy is their neighbors and they need to direct their resources to defeating each other instead of working together to solve the actual problems. For example, when SOPA/PIPA was defeated, it not only wasn't just along party lines, there was more opposition to it from Republicans than Democrats: https://projects.propublica.org/sopa/pipa.html So who we like here are e.g. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY), because they both opposed it, even though they're in different parties. But then the "parties matter, not candidates" people would have you trying to oust everyone with the disfavored letter next to their name even if they did the right thing there. Which helps the baddies win by convincing you to oust good candidates from the "bad" party in favor of bad candidates from the "good" party, and over time makes both parties worse even as people become increasingly dissatisfied with the way things are going. | ||
| ▲ | guelo 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |
It took tens of millions of dead to create the relative peace of the later 20th century, that is a hell of a rock bottom. We got the UN, nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, war crimes treaties, free trade, unprecedented prosperity. It's humanity's greatest achievement but we're throwing it all away. Partly due to attacks from monied interests and propagandists, partly to protect Israel (the 15th Crusade), partly because of hatred of peaceniks and bureaucrats, but largely because we've all forgotten the costly lessons. | ||