But I guess I can understand it somewhat. It took me a long time to come to terms with it as well. The genocide of the natives didn't sink in until I saw a list of the native languages that were wiped out along with the natives. It was dozens and dozens of languages. Many times more languages than exists in the whole of europe.
"Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides ... they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation.... this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated. "
Bartolomé de las Casas - A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
What's the saying? History is written by the victors? I don't think there will ever be a reconciliation in history for the elimination of native peoples across two continents.
It's disheartening / devastating / infuriating that the genocide of 120-40M people barely pierces the consciousness of the dominant culture when talking about apocalypses or genocides...
It is also hilarious that the USSR is the only country apart from Japan to successfully industrialize and avoid a colonial genocide from a Western power.
If you could pick a place to live being a Russian in Moscow 1919 would give you a much better chance of surviving compared to being an Indian in Manhattan in 1624, Toronto in 1787 or Melbourne in 1835.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691152387/st...
Thailand was never a colony either. Besides, USSR was not a country and formed after the colonial heydays.
(I'm relieved that) people have gotten sick and tired of the restrictions, about 50% (and growing every day) are not wearing the masks inside anymore, or bother with the distancing, despite official requirements. All restaurants and bars are opening up on Monday, my favourite one described the prior atmosphere as a "psychosis of fear".
It's interesting what happens when the second wave of infections occurs, which is becoming more and more likely. It's hard to imagine the population will be as fearful and obedient as the first time, should the government try to impose another lockdown.
If, as Nassim Taleb believes, the lockdown was bottom-up, demanded by the people rather than imposed by the government, a repeat seems unlikely. Perhaps that's why the stock market is surging?
Addendum: In no meaningful way is Poland some weeks ahead of the US. Poland is on around day 45 since the first people started dying, the US are on day 55. Throughout, around 10 times as many people (per capita; ie. 883 have died in Poland overall, if the statistics can be trusted) have died in the US each day from the disease, which presumably means that around 10 times as many people were infected. Like I said above, Poland has stopped the disease in its tracks, which is good! But it doesn't confer some sort of societal immunity.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-deaths-trajec...
The main beneficiaries of that mask wearing are the employees, which sort of hollows out most of the reasons to refuse.
As for the apocalyptic atmosphere - it doesn't seem possible to really predict how bad/good things will get. How many predicted during WW2 that upon its exit would be a period of unprecedented social progress & economic equality?
* new research indicates that parts of the Amazon and other tropical forests are now emitting more CO2 than they absorb https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-carbon-cycle-feedbacks-co...
* one billion people will suffer from “unliveable” heat within 50 years, study finds https://e360.yale.edu/digest/one-billion-people-will-suffer-...
* potentially fatal bouts of heat and humidity on the rise, study finds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/08/climate-...
* study finds ocean ecosystems likely to collapse in 2020s and land species in 2040s unless global warming stemmed https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife...
* studies show drought and heat waves will cause massive die-offs, killing most trees alive today https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24042020/forest-trees-cli...
* multiple overlapping crises could trigger 'Global Systemic Collapse' https://www.sciencealert.com/hundreds-of-top-scientists-warn...
* 246 academics call on government to act now to avoid global collapse https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/02/04/opinion/246-acad...
* Planet's largest ecosystems collapse faster than previously forecast https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15029-x
World's oceans are also acidifying to a similar rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification#Rate as the Permian extinction (but again in 100 years instead of 20k-60k), with an anoxic event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event#Consequences locked in after 1,000ppm or 360 gigatons https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170920182116.h..., which we will reach by 2100 at the latest. So that's whatever's left wiped out.
And here's what's currently happening with food production. Two different groups of 200+ scientists and academics, separately from each other, each warned of near-term global collapse:
* https://www.sciencealert.com/hundreds-of-top-scientists-warn...
* https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/02/04/opinion/246-acad...
Examples of record-breaking crop failures currently happening:
* https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/midwe...
* https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/19/extreme-heat-wave-hits-us-fa...
* https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/15/austr...
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/20/crop-fai...
* https://www.zerohedge.com/health/historic-midwest-blizzard-h...
* https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-02/low-rice-crop-lead...
* https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...
* https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-whammy-corn-belt.html
* https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/12/britain-facing-p...
* https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-08-01-drou...
* https://phys.org/news/2020-01-atlantic-circulation-collapse-...
* https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-threat-global-breadbas...
* https://phys.org/news/2019-12-large-atmospheric-jet-stream-g...
Scientific studies projecting future crop failures:
* Schlenker and Roberts, 2009. Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to US crop yields under climate change. PNAS, 106(37), pp.15594-15598 https://www.pnas.org/content/106/37/15594.full
* Mora et al, 2015. Suitable days for plant growth disappear under projected climate change: Potential human and biotic vulnerability. PLoS bio, 13(6), p.e1002167 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
* Schauberger et al, 2017. Consistent negative response of US crops to high temperatures in observations and crop models. Nature Comms, 8, p.13931. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13931
* Sakschewski et al, 2014. Feeding 10 billion people under climate change: How large is the production gap of current agricultural systems?. Ecological modelling, 288, pp.103-111 https://booksc.xyz/book/30274837/03002c
* Liang et al, 2017. Determining climate effects on US total agricultural productivity. PNAS, 114(12), pp.E2285-E2292 https://www.pnas.org/content/114/12/E2285?collection=
News articles about projected crop failures:
* UN says passing 2C will have a 'very high projected risk' of global food supply instabilities https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/news/climate-change-could-trigg...
* UN says passing 2C would cause 'multi-breadbasket failure' https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/climate/climate-change-fo...)
* UN says passing 2C would cause 60% of global wheat to be subjected to 'Severe Water Scarcity (SVS)' drought events https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/26/new-research-wa...
Given that our response to the pandemic has been to largely ignore the science and try to get back to business as usual and we're still largely pretending that climate change isn't happening, I don't really have much hope for continued existence of human civilization.
This post is pure fear porn. Environmentalists have been making these same doomsday predictions since literally the 60s and deadlines continue to come and go without incident.
Look, the papers that predict what's more likely to happen aren't sexy, so they don't get read much if they're published at all. The truth is that based on all of our evidence regarding the speed of climate change in the past, if there's any change from human emissions it will be slow and take on the order of 100+ years, during which time the only measurable indicator will be an increased rate of turnover and spending for infrastructure projects, maybe a slight uptick in immigration, as we have a bigger storm or a bigger flood here and there.
That doesn't even mention the potential benefits to climate change - there's nothing that says that the earth won't potentially have more fertile land area if the permafrost thaws, for example. But such an attitude is clearly not popular among alarmists.
Climate change denialists don't seem to grasp the concept of basic risk assessment. We don't know exactly what will happen, however we definitely know what could potentially happen. Claiming that just because the scientists might be wrong there's nothing to worry about is the height of insanity. You're essentially advocating for playing Russian roulette with our biosphere.
People who actually study the climate are the ones who have the best idea of what will happen. Period. These people are unanimously telling the rest of us that all the best available evidence suggests that horrific things will happen.
And now we're seeing these things starting to happen, and we're seeing them happen at a faster rate than was expected. Yet, idiots who have absolutely zero understanding of this domain continue to insist that there's nothing to worry about because they read something on Facebook that one time.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-mo...
People predict sportsball outcomes. A much smaller problem domain, with far more historical data, insane audience engagement (interest), and ample expertise.
Are sportsball predictions qualitatively better than pandemic predictions?
"The numbers killed in terrorist incidents may be small. But the threat is endemic, and the texture of everyday life has altered profoundly. Video cameras and security procedures in public places have become part of the way we live."
The author writes about this as if our response to terrorism is some sort of deterministic feature of the natural world. Instead, however, our response is series of distinct policy choices, none of which were ever inevitable and all of which are subject to change (even if that change is hard to accomplish).
The security theater in (particularly US) airports is not a deterministic consequence of terrorism - it's the result of the policies of the GW Bush administration. The widespread use of CCTV cameras in the UK is not a deterministic response to crime and/or terrorism - it's the result of several governments worth of explicit policy, as evidenced by the remarkably lower use of such cameras in other nations affected by similar phenomena.
Talking about "what has happened" as if it was inevitable, and not the result of choices made by the powerful is dangerous and dampens the possibility of a belief in other outcomes.
Some years ago I realised that there are in fact two uses of the term "invisible* in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Among oths I find the significance of the more well-known one to be greatly overstated. But the other seems notable on several counts:
"Regularity, order, and prompt obedience to command are qualities which, in modern armies, are of more importance towards determining the fate of battles than the dexterity and skill of the soldiers in the use of their arms. But the noise of firearms, the smoke, and the invisible death to which every man feels himself every moment exposed as soon as he comes within cannon-shot, and frequently a long time before the battle can be well said to be engaged, must render it very difficult to maintain any considerable degree of this regularity, order, and prompt obedience, even in the beginning of a modern battle. In an ancient battle there was no noise but what arose from the human voice; there was no smoke, there was no invisible cause of wounds or death. Every man, till some mortal weapon actually did approach him, saw clearly that no such weapon was near him. In these circumstances, and among troops who had some confidence in their own skill and dexterity in the use of their arms, it must have been a good deal less difficult to preserve some degree regularity and order...
Smith, WoN, Book V, Chapter 1
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...
That is, it's the loss of certainty and security which of itself is exceptionally disruptive of order.
Terrorism is (generally) rare, but is specifically directed so as to inflict maximal disruption.
Disease, especially epidemics, are trust attacks. We cannot be know with any certainty what otherwise innocent and trivial encounters or activities might. have major consequence. Entirely unaware individuals may be exposing others to grave harm. Paranoia is prudence.
You can see this even with the case of sars-cov-2, where different policy decisions about the response have contributed to (or resulted in?) different impacts around the world. I imagine we will see it going forward too, just as we do with differing responses to terrorism.
dramatically the ruling family (romanovs) among the 3 most successful expansionist dynasties next to english & spanish were totally annihilated at the end by their own people.
https://youtu.be/bfN2JWifLCY https://youtu.be/6cYjjEB3Ev8 https://youtu.be/bl-sZdfLcEk
https://mobile.twitter.com/freddiesayers/status/126132013778...
PATRIOT Act would like a word.
(ps: I realize this will seem wacko to most, but I'd appreciate it if you skim my reasoning, I worked hard to make it skimmable while saying in detail how I came to these conclusions, and add a reasoned comment, with any downvotes. Thanks.)
I am the son, and the heir....
of an apocolypse that is criminally vulgar.
I am the son and heir....
of nothing in particular.
On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMxiv15iK_MFayY_3fU9loQ
Medieval english king alfred kept a chronicle of his time. Viking invasions such. His "political theories" were religious: righteous christians, pagans, heretics, divine justice & such. That's how they understood their history.
Biblical "chronicles" like the book of kings, judges & such offer a similar take. Sin & righteousness determine wars, invasions, usurpations & coups.... apocalyptical or otherwise.
Move into the French, American & derivitive revolutions of 1700-1800s: Reason, Industrialism, Enlightenment Philosophy & such. revolutions. Political theories. Liberty. Rights. etc. Instead of righteous & piety, radical liberals would build free & just societies.
So... French liberty culminates in a pretty vicious and vindictive early republic which soon crowns an emperor. American liberty did not seem overly bothered by an institution of slavery that was vast and cruel enough to make a pharaoh uneasy. Liberty didn't apply to native americans and often "person" meant just male landowners.
Meanwhile the theoretically opposite British, with their anti-liberal constitutional monarchy... Not really less "liberal" in practice, from a historical perspective.
Liberal or conservative commentators from the period (even modern ones) seem to think everything is derivative of the political theories battling it out. It's not that different from ancient judeans or medieval saxons interpreting every event via their religious lens.
IRL, the relationship between political theories, practice, & history is chaotic & uncorrelated.
Liberalism, socialism, communism, etc.... theory does not generate into reality, hardly ever.