Okay, this comment thread has convinced me that almost noone here actually reads anything but the headline. I think I’m gonna resign from Lemmy too… Is there somewhere online where intelligent adults have conversations?

Lol.

I actually agree with most of your statement, except for “DIRECT”. That’s not part of my claim, and it shouldn’t be a goal of yours.

The terrain has been rigged so that all the direct, the locally advantageous, locally practical solutions lead back to the same toxic equilibrium. We are stuck in a historical basin of attraction and need to escape it.

The only long-term stable/viable solution, the only solution that honours our responsibility to future generations, is to avoid the immediate direct solutions, the ones that the manipulated incentive structures are set up to anticipate, and to do what you described. I’m not claiming it’s easy, or likely to happen, merely that it’s our only chance to save our species from itself.

Counterargument: it makes sense to support whatever system would create the best life for everyone, rather than just creating good experiences for you while others are forced to struggle and suffer, because you aren’t a selfish arsehole.

Another version: it makes sense to support whatever system creates the most good for everyone AND is most stable, because the countless future generations matter far more than you.

The scale at which we exert political control has been increasing consistently for, approximately, the last 10k years. The rate has been accelerating too. There’s no reason to believe that the current hodge podge of 300 or so regional factions (nations) is the natural or final solution, and every reason to expect that political/economic power will escalate to the global level, and soon.

We should be focused on ensuring that transition is peaceful and collaborative, that the solution we converge on is fair and sustainable. We should especially be concerned with preventing that transition from being a dominance play by the players currently holding the greatest defacto power (i.e., economic, transnational corporations, and military, the USA).

One major impediment to this is the idea that all we—the ordinary people all over the world—can do is fight amongst each other at a national level about relatively trivial social issues (i.e., by voting for the marginally less bad alternative in our national elections). We can, and should, organise and strive for a democratic, fair, well-designed global political system that keeps economic power in check.

Other major impediments are the lies that a) the only alternative to the current system is totalitarian communism, or other 19th century political models, and b) that we—you and I—need to have a perfect solution in hand already. We can demand, via our respective nations, that the world’s best minds come together and design the best system possible, and that was transition to that system peacefully and rationally.

We need a global solution. The scale of economic power is larger than the scale of our democratically controlled political power. Nationalism won’t save us.

You have me at a depressive phase, exhausted from my work week, so I fully agree with you. However, I know the more optimistic version of me would say:

But we overcame feudalism, we abolished slavery. These were also systems where the (incentives * power to change things) were strong and aligned to preserve the status quo. Still, our ancestors made the choices that made the world better for us, rather than for them. There must be a prosocial kernel in us, a drive we could appeal to if we could just broadcast a coordination signal loud and reliable enough.

I live in a remote town with a sizable population of city-raised, university-educated workers. I’m surrounded by people fully committed to both the liberal and conservative worldviews. Both groups have shitty individuals, exploiting the beliefs and biases of their faction for their personal advantage (the liberal ones tend to be smarter and more insidious, but all the worse for it; the conservatives dumber and more direct). But the majority of both groups are well-intentioned, caring people who would and do sacrifice for others. They’re just all convinced that fighting the mostly good people in the other faction is what’s right, rather than working together to change the game entirely. The challenge is to convince, to coordinate, not to defeat.

Thanks for the chat. It’s rare to have an intelligent dialogue on here, especially when politics is involved.

I feel that if you can perceive/understand a problem and it’s consequences, you become morally culpable for solving it, however hard that might be.

By “generation”, I mean all the people alive today, and in the last century or so, rather than those discrete named decadal generations. Collectively, especially in the face of climate change and the accelerating consumption of non-renewable resources, we know that our actions could doom countless future generations. It’s our responsibility to build a sustainable world. But instead we choose cheaper prices and immediate advantages for ourselves and our factions (nations, ethnic groups, political parties, cultural identity groups, etc).

Yeah, this is exactly the dilemma we’re facing. Some days I feel like it’s impossible, our species is doomed and it’s our generations’ fault. This was the pivot point where we had the knowledge, the technology, the potential to organised ourselves to sustainably share this planet in perpetuity, but instead we chose short-term greed and factionalism.

To your opening question: in two dimensions, you can stay still in one while moving along the other.

We’re in a complex multidimensional space of political/economic possibilities, but the current discourse keeps everything focused on a single left/right dimension as though that’s all that matters. By ensuring you’re only seeing that battle, always fighting the other half of the population, they prevent any possibility of change in other directions (e.g., massive capital market reform/redistribution).

I’m not American so can’t speak to your detailed points about Republicans, but the same left/right, liberal/conservative division is happening everywhere, as well as the simultaneous acceleration of the polarisation of wealth, erosion of wealth redistribution systems and rapid destruction of our global environment for the short term gain of the ultra wealthy.

Insisting that you must constantly fight the other half of your country’s population is an error. You are being distracted and misled. So are they. You don’t win by beating them. You win by convincing them to stop fighting too.

By the same logic, the more either party wins, the more the Overton window stays fixed on the current systemic status quo being the only viable, or even imaginable system.

Both parties are unambiguously serving the interests of their respective elites. They’re just using different tactics to distract their respective audiences. In both cases the core strategy is to evoke the strong emotional intuition that sacred values are being violated. For conservatives, those values are tradition, and especially sexual norms. For liberals, it’s the protection of vivid victims.

The only actual solution is to stop fighting your enemies and start working together to actually redistribute power and reform the whole system.

Oh, worth putting out there, the other tactic I see often is to create the impression that the only alternatives are 19th century political philosophies: capitalism vs communism, etc. In reality, there is a massive space of potential global political and economic systems we could adopt, and we’re in a much better position to work together as a single species to scientifically explore that space and design a stable global system than we were 150 years ago. But we can’t get started while everyone is convinced that all they can do is vote for their team in the next election.

And the other half genuinely think that their team of bought politicians are the good guys…

Oh my sweet summer child. How have the jailors convinced you that half of them are on your side and it’s just the other jailors that are keeping you here?

Lipps is back home in Tennessee

she lost her home, her car and even her dog

At least there’ll be a lot of very relatable music…

Thanks, that makes more sense. I especially like the public toilet analogy. Afterlife beliefs really do bring the urinal home.

I don’t understand how this makes sense:

If you stop existing after death whatever you decide to do now doesn’t matter any more.

How does existing after death make the things you do matter? How does not existing make them not matter? I genuinely don’t understand what you mean.

Not trying to trivialize your position, just make sense of it, but I think the hidden assumption is something like: you are an algorithm for trying to create good experiences for your brain/human; the things you do matter only if they, ultimately result in better experiences for you; if, eventually, you have no experiences, there is no point striving for anything?

Is it something like that? That still doesn’t really make sense to me. Even if we accept the assumptions, why wouldn’t creating good experiences for your human temporarily, just until you die, matter?

Derp. Now I get it. In my defence, I’m also an Aussie so understandably thick. But I live in the Arctic now, where we’ve got all three bears. But the scary white ones stay away from the woods.

A polar bear in the woods? They’re an aquatic mammal that lives on sea ice… Where are you from?

Each physical store can have different prices on the same goods, to exploit the average differences between the populations in each area. Already happens between countries/continents, now it can happen on a neighborhood scale.

I’m not a fan of insurance companies, but the dental/medical insurance split makes sense. Insurance is fundamentally a risk hedging game. It matters what the risks are. Most medical conditions will only happen to a small percentage of people, so we can all put money into a pool and pay out to the unlucky people who, for example, get cancer. Almost everyone needs some dental work eventually, everyone’s teeth wear down. Dental insurance is more like a savings plan than a gamble on rare outcomes. It doesn’t make sense to pool those risks together.